Arabs retells a familiar story in unexpected ways ... [Mackintosh Smith] combines deep learning with penetrating insights delivered with dazzling turns of phrase and illuminating comparisons ... The author’s acclaimed Travels in Dictionary Land was a clue to his fascination with both his adopted country and the Arabic language – the golden thread that runs through this wonderful new book ... Mackintosh-Smith has an enviable ability to enrich the big picture with fascinating detail and telling parallels ... Hope is kept alive by a writer who lifts spirits and fires the imagination by comparing pre-Islamic poetry to pop festivals ... Words are, indeed, still the sharpest weapons ...
There can hardly be a better guide than Mackintosh-Smith, who has near-mythical status among western observers of the Middle East ... Between the meticulous scholarship he drops fleeting references to the military exercises and propaganda he can see from his window in the street below. The picture he paints is as depressing as it is, in parts, glorious ... Mackintosh-Smith could have done with more editing. His scholarly enthusiasm is largely entrancing, but occasionally drifts into incomprehensibility ... If the book encourages a more sympathetic understanding of Arabs, though, the effort will have been worthwhile.
[a] superb account of the Arabs over three millennia ... As a privileged observer of his 'adoptive land,' with a rare mastery of Arabic, both classical and modern, he is ideally positioned to make the tangled past vividly present. His use of the Arabic language as a recurrent point of reference is only one important aspect of Mr. Mackintosh-Smith’s originality of approach ... The sheer onrush of events in this history could have proved overwhelming in the telling ... But Mr. Mackintosh-Smith handles his complex account with great aplomb ... There are occasional lapses ... he writes with wit and verve ... His words...tacitly offer an exuberant homage to his fractious and eloquent masters.
Undoubtedly brilliant, his book might have benefited from a sharper editorial knife. But it is rare to encounter the combination of commanding erudition and swashbuckling prose on such a grand scale...his book deserves a far wider audience than its academic publisher might reach. Buy Arabs, and make him more pecunious.
This is a sad book. [Mackintosh-Smith] writes with passion in the midst of bombs and violent protest. Yet at the heart of his book is the paradox that the essence of the Arab existence is discontinuity and confusion, rather than unity and cohesion ... The author abandons any claim to balance when he declares 'the Israelis have graduated from throwing bombs to the more civilized method of dropping them' ... The author is long on quotations from Arabic sources but short on their wider context ... These oversights suggest that the author’s agenda has been so narrowly focussed on elucidating the essential nature of Arab identity through the ages that it has preferred not to take a wider perspective on the controversial and multicultural hinterland of his subject. Moreover, the endnotes are so impenetrable as to disaffect the enquiring reader.
An engaging history of the Arab world by a Yemen-based Westerner thoroughly versed in Arabic ... [an] extensive, illuminating narrative of the Arab people from ancient to modern times ... A marvelous journey brimming with adventure and poetry and narrated by a keen, compassionate observer.
