Article October 15, 2001 Issue

TO UNDERSTAND the Muslim world ...

'Their good is not different from ours.'

R. Stephen Humphreys

A Middle East Watcher for at least 30 years, R. Stephen Humphreys has written Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age (which has just come out in paperback: Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) Humphreys is currently a professor of history and Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The Sentinel spoke with him about the Muslim worldview and how this influences policy in that region.

In your book, why did you choose to focus on the Muslim world instead of including Israel as well?

If you look at the territory, I think the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel are about eight thousand square miles, something like that. The territory—land mass—of the Middle East, from Morocco, let's say, to Afghanistan, is more than four million square miles. So it's a very big place, and Israel plus the Palestinian territories is not an awfully big part of it even though that one corner tends to dominate our attention.

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