Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World.

Each day the news from the Arab world gets better--then worse, and then better again, and then.... Rather, it becomes more pathetic--in the original sense of suffering which moves the emotions. A massacre, a retaliation. One day, Clyde Haberman tells a love story in the New York Times (May 2) of an Arab man and a Jewish woman, both Israelis, who courted, and married--she, pregnant with the Arab's child, left her Jewish husband and took her new husband's religion--only to have her killed when an Islamic militant blew up her bus on April 6. At her grave, an uncle remarked that God had punished her for marrying an Arab.

A few days later (May 5), Haberman compares the Gaza-Jericho self-rule agreement to a divorce in which the separated couple must keep living in the same house.

To anyone who travels in the Arab world and listens to both Arabs and Jews, this metaphor of intimacy, of the marriage paradoxically both meant-to-be yet doomed-to-be-broken, rings true. A look at the map, plus some political and economic vision, suggests that the Arab states and Israel should "marry"; yet a hundred forces--not just the Arab-Israeli conflict--are pulling them apart.

I returned from a month-long Arab-sponsored trip to Jordan and Syria last summer, and a visit on my own to Iraq and Jordan the year before, starved for a rational discussion of questions distorted by generations of accumulated hatred. In this context, Milton Viorst's Sandcastles, which makes a rich variety of Arab voices--from king to peasant--heard, is welcome indeed. Over the past several years, Viorst has returned again and again on assignment for the New Yorker to Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and the occupied territories. He has reinterviewed his sources, as recently as November 1993, all the while combining the intellectual openness of a good listener and the skepticism of a careful journalist. Viorst himself is Jewish, but he is walking in Arab shoes; his goal--to convey a feel for Arab society today. Yet, inevitably, he views this society through the Western liberal tradition, with the assumption that Arab nations must come to terms with the "modern"--meaning Western--world.

Viorst leads us along the crowded alleys of Cairo's Gamaliya, over trash heaps, under pointed arches, past a marble fountain where a middle-aged woman waits to fill her pitcher for the evening's cooking. He is in search of Nobel laureate Nagib Mahfouz, whose novels on urban life only indirectly dare to question an oppressive political system.

And he beautifully captures the "roller-coaster geography" of Amman, with its sparkling white stone houses and clean winding streets, which lead the traveler from one surprise to another. At the Jordanian royal palace he records a statement by Queen Noor which summarizes much of his book: "The problem as we see it is that most Americans don't want to know how we feel."

As an historian, he traces the background of political movements--the post-World War I attempt of teh colonial powers to impose the Hashemite dynasty on Jordan, Syria, and Iraq; the fleeting visions of Arab unity--either Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser's or Jordan's King Abdullah's; the PLO's transformation from terrorism to participation in the peace process; the originally Christian-inspired Ba'athist movement, with its cry of "unity, freedon, and socialism," which in its attempt to distinguish between Islam as a civilization and as a religion, moved Arab nations one step toward secularism--and toward modernity.

Viorst evaluates each head of state on the basis of how well he has succeeded in leading his country into the modern era. Turkey's Kemal Ataturk, the army officer who in 1922 seized power in Istanbul as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the authoritarian secularist who transformed a civilization, is, in Viorst's view, a model leader for the Arab world. Unfortunately the Arabs are usually stuck with a Nasser or a Saddam Hussein, secularists "whose attraction to a quick-fix vision of grandeur overrode their commitment to social and intellectual transformation."

Many of Viorst's best voices are lesser-known people in whose battered homes in Beirut or Gaza or Kuwait he drinks coffee and, Studs Terkel-like, lets them talk.

A few days before Viorst approached Abu Zaida in Gaza, Israeli soldiers had just demolished his house--one of five hundred leveled in the first three years of the intifada. Of Zaida's nine children, two had been arrested for their political activities; so the family was to be punished for their crimes. When the troops came in the morning they had Abu Zaida move all the furniture into the kitchen, which, they said, would be allowed to stand. Then they came back that night and destroyed the kitchen. But Abu was still proud of his sons.

In Kuwait, Viorst discovers Suleiman Al-Shaheen, an undersecretary of foreign affairs, who, traumatized by the effects of the Iraqi invasion, is now torn between the values of Arab sovereignty, which implies Kuwaitis' local right to use their riches as they choose, and his realization that other nations--referring to the Palestinians whom they ruthlessly expelled after the war--have suffered longer, more painful occupations. "We use money," he says, "to provide physical gratification; it's the only way we know."

Sandcastles' potentially most controversial passages are the Jordan-Kuwait-Iraq chapters where, although he acknowledges he has not come up with a "smoking gun," Viorst builds a circumstantial case that Jordan's King Hussein was close to a diplomatic solution, blocked by President George Bush and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, that would have led to Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait.

According to this secenario, the Bush administration persuaded Kuwait to so harden its bargaining position in the Iraq-Kuwait economic war, where Kuwait's lowering oil prices were wrecking Iraq's economy, that Saddam was goaded, "shamed," or "trapped" into invading.

Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, who Viorst, having checked Aziz's testimony with other sources, is convinced is a credible person, told Viorst, "I'm not a strong believer in conspiracies, but they do exist.... War seems to come, whatever we do. It seems to be our historical tradition to suffer and to fail."

Aziz's statement is both a window into the Arab mind and a bump into the wall that makes rational dialogue so hard to come by. After a session in Amman last summer between a delegation of visiting professors and high Jordanian officials, during which a member of the Muslim Brotherhood repeatedly condemned the United States for its "double standard" of punishing Iraq's aggression but not Israel's or Serbia's, a Jordanian official said to me privately, "The trouble with the Arabs is that they blame everyone else for their problems."

Viorst is caught in the paradox of his own position. He respects the Arabs, and supports their right to the occupied territories; yet he must still hold them largely responsible for their unsatisfactory progress, for the "sandcastle" fragility of their community. The flaw, he suggests, is Islam itself as an intellectual tradition, a system which holds that learning is fixed, where students resist going beyond the book and thus remain walled off from rationalism, from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, by a fundamentalism that blames the West for every social ill.

A permanently closed mind is a major obstacle. It is as if the wedding guest had discovered a deep fault in one of the spouses and returned home depressed about the new couple's future. Viorst rescues his journey from a discouraging return home by giving the last word to King Hussein. In an earlier visit the king had wondered how the Israelis, having suffered so much, could inflict such suffering on others. In the Epilogue, he interprets the Koran to allow for a Jewish state, and concludes that not the Israelis but the Arabs themselves, with their doubts about their own self-worth, threaten the Arab future.

The chances are that tomorrow's paper will have some good news from the Middle East; and then the day after tomorrow....