250 A Short History of the Middle East
educated, disillusioned by the ineptitude, corruption, or indiffer-
ence of the professional politicians; it has held out before them the
elimination of the foreigner and the Copt as competitors for the
limited number of desirable jobs, and a paper-programme of social
justice based on the Qur'an and the Sunna; but there have been
some indications in the past year that it may be passing the peak of
its influence.
To sum up, the younger generation of the educated class present
a rather pathetic picture of'wanderers between two worlds'. They
have not yet had time to acquire more than the bare externals of
Western culture without usually grasping its inner quality. Many
of them, however, having grown up in an atmosphere of material-
ism, have turned from their own Arab and Muslim culture, feeling
shamefacedly that it has been weighed against that of Europe in the
only test they recognize as valid, that of material success, and found
wanting; and when they do claim merit for their own civilization,
it is too often without apparently being able to express wherein
that civilization has in the past excelled. Professor H. A. R. Gibb,
whom no one could accuse of lack of sympathy for Arab cultural
aspirations, has stated, 1 have not seen any book written in Arabic
for Arabs themselves which has clearly analysed what Arabic cul-
ture means for Arabs/1 Their superficiality and instability of
thought is not, however, the inherent fault of this generation so
much as its misfortune in being a generation of transition, neither
fully Muslim nor fully European, neither fully traditional nor fully
emancipated. Albert Hourani has analysed the phenomenon in a
penetrating passage: 'The change is not from one static position to
another, but from a static community ruled by custom to a dyna-
mic society, moulded and governed by positive laws and by a con-
ception of individual, social, or national welfare. It may be that
the difficulties will so press on the Arabs that they will accept self-
division as inevitable and give up the attempt to reconcile the new
and the old. If that happens they will become Levantines. To be a
Levantine ... is to belong to no community and to possess nothing
of one's own. . . . The special mark of the present age is the spread
of the Levant inland.... In a sense every ... educated Arab of the
towns is forced to live in two worlds. Not only his way of thought
but his social life is becoming daily more deeply affected by Europe
and America; but at heart he is still an Arab and usually a Muslim.
1 The Near East, Problems and Prospects, ed. P. W. Ireland (1942), 60.