ABSTRACT
In a well-known and oft-repeated statement, the French scholar Ernest Renan wrote in 1851 that, unlike the other founders of major religions, the Prophet Muhammad "was bom in the full light of history". Empires of the Sand shreds the main reason for Europeans to feel guilt ridden toward the Middle East. Militant Islamic parties have done impressively well in nearly all the Muslim countries with electoral politics. As a scholar, Fouad Ajami focuses not on the usual questions of statecraft and foreign policy, but on intellectual developments in the Arabic-speaking world. Iran has been a land susceptible to the power of ideas, to political and philosophical abstraction, to the pamphleteer. Arab nationalism "hatched a monster" in the Iraqi bid for Kuwait in 1990. The great majority of the Arab intellectual elite repudiated Oslo as "not their peace but the rulers' peace".
