THE DREAM PALACE OF THE ARABS: A Generation’s Odyssey.<i> By Fouad Ajami</i> .<i> Pantheon: 344 pp., $26</i>

February 1998. Once again, Western powers threaten to inflict massive destruction on an Arab country accused of concealing weapons of mass destruction. Once again, the Arab intelligentsia, swallowing its dislike of the Iraqi dictator, pours out its anger and its conspiracy theories. And once again, a lone Arab voice, while skeptical of American pretensions, courts the charge of treason by refusing to join in the chorus.

Instead of denouncing United States imperialism, Fouad Ajami sneers, in the New Republic, at “the spectacle of a great power asserting imperial prerogatives but reluctant to walk the beat.” That his latest book, “The Dream Palace of the Arabs,” should also appear at this moment will no doubt do more for his sales in the United States than for his reputation among fellow Arab writers.

No Arab intellectual has made himself so cordially disliked by his peers as this Lebanese American political scientist. The problem is not that he is critical of Arab governments: That would win him sympathy and admiration. His unpardonable sin is to write disparagingly of Arab culture, especially in its nationalist mode, and to be unembarrassed about the comfort he thereby gives to the Zionist enemy. When an Arab writer is published in the New Republic and expresses his gratitude to its publisher Martin Peretz (as Ajami does in “The Dream Palace of the Arabs”), he is quite consciously putting himself beyond the Arab nationalist pale. He has, in the eyes of other Arab writers, sold out.

The title he has chosen for this series of essays on 20th century Arab writers is itself a provocation. It is taken, as the author acknowledges, from T.E. Lawrence--a British imperialist who romanticized the Bedouin way of life but had little interest in modern urban Arab culture--and from one of his most insufferably patronizing passages, in which he wrote of his own ambition “to make a new nation” and “to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream palace of their national thoughts.”

As Ajami points out, the Arabs did not need Lawrence to do this for them. “On their own, in the barracks and in the academies, in the principal cities of the Arab world--Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo--Arabs had built their own dream palace--an intellectual edifice of secular nationalism and modernity.” Yet by choosing the phrase “dream palace” to describe this edifice, Ajami clearly means to stress its illusory and insubstantial nature and to prepare the reader for a bleak tale of defeat and disillusionment.

Such is his tale indeed. It was bound to be, for even the most fervent believer in Arab nationalism would not claim the last 30 years as a success story. The question is: In what spirit is the tale told? Ajami’s critics might accuse him of gloating once again over their failures and lost illusions, of exploiting his own people’s misery to carve himself a comfortable niche in the United States’ cultural and political establishment.

Ajami replies to this potential charge implicitly rather than explicitly. In a short, partly autobiographical prologue, he acknowledges or claims the heritage of Arab nationalism as his own. “Today in the Arab world,” he writes, “I am a stranger, but no distance could wash me clean of that inheritance.” More remarkably, he goes on to pronounce a partial retraction of an earlier book--the one that really established him, “The Arab Predicament” (1980). He says that when he wrote that book, “I was younger and approached my material more eager to judge. In my haste and dissatisfaction with what the modern experience in the Arab world had brought forth, I did not appreciate what had gone into the edifice that Arabs had built.”

So the present book is in some sense an attempt to make amends, to set the record straight, to do justice to the richness, complexity and diversity of 20th century Arab culture and to the courage and honesty of many individual Arab writers.

Ajami does not absolve these writers as a class of their share in the ill-fated venture of Arab nationalism nor does he overlook the individual inconsistencies, or worse, which many have been guilty of. But he is at pains to demonstrate the literary powers, and the sincerity, even of those whom politically he most disagrees with--giving, for example, his own long and moving translation of a poem denouncing the Oslo peace process, written by “the Arab world’s most popular poet,” Nizar Qabbani, in 1995.

Ajami seems to share the pain, and even some of the shame, that other Arab intellectuals feel about the shipwreck of the nationalist dream, even if he is not prepared to join them in what he would consider futile denunciations of Israeli or American policy. His tone is much milder, for instance, than that of the Iraqi writer Kanaan Makiya in his book “Cruelty and Silence,” who accuses the whole Arab intelligentsia of ignoring or covering up Saddam Hussein’s crimes.

“It is the besetting sin--and poverty--of a good deal of writing on the Arab world,” Ajami remarks, “that is done by many who have no mastery of Arabic.” I plead guilty to this charge, but being a native Arabic-speaker has not saved Ajami himself from one egregious howler: He gives the name of Anwar Sadat’s assassin as Istanbuli instead of Islambuli.

“The Dream Palace of the Arabs” is essentially a series of pen portraits of Arab writers, somewhat arbitrarily chosen and arranged. In the prologue, we get Ajami himself; Buland Haidari, an Iraqi poet who died in 1996; and George Antonius, author of “The Arab Awakening”--a kind of nationalist bible for Westernized Arabs and pro-Arab Westerners, published in 1939.

A whole chapter devoted to Khalil Hawi, a Lebanese poet who committed suicide in 1982, on the day of the Israeli invasion, is the most interesting. Hawi gets fuller treatment than the other writers and benefits from it. At first sight there is little that one would expect to recommend him to Ajami. He was obviously a bitter and difficult character with an enormous chip on his shoulder, coming as he did from much humbler social origins than most of his intellectual peers. He was also one of the prime articulators of the Arab nationalist outlook that Ajami rejects.

But Ajami has treated this as a challenge. Very conscious of his own background in the underdog Shiite Muslim community of the south, Ajami clearly identifies with this lonely, angular figure from a poor Christian village high up in the northern mountains. Helped by a biography that Hawi’s brother wrote after his death, Ajami chips away at the Arab nationalist icon and finds beneath it a very Lebanese figure: complex, tormented and emblematic of the orthodox Christian community, which is forever seeking to escape from its double minority status both in Maronite Mount Lebanon and in the predominantly Muslim Arab world. In the process, he gives us a brilliant sketch of Hawi’s unexpected mentor, Anton Saadeh, apostle of a blind-alley, greater-Syria nationalist movement with fascist overtones. Saadeh was put to death by the Lebanese government in 1949 after a rocambolesque attempted coup d’etat.

Saadeh’s movement led nowhere: The “nation” in whose name he revolted had some objective historical and geographical plausibility, embracing as it did the lands between the desert and the sea--today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine-Israel--but had no subjective sense of itself. Pan-Arab nationalism, based on language, had a deeper as well as broader appeal and in the end won the allegiance even of Saadeh’s former disciples, such as Hawi and the Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi. When the nationalist vision fragmented, it did so into smaller, more tangible communities based on sect or clan or even on the despised 20th century states with their arbitrary colonial frontiers. Yet Saadeh’s charisma was extraordinary and his style of politics deeply influential, even though the content was abandoned.

The following chapter, “In the Shape of the Ancestors,” has less of a clear unifying theme. Ajami arouses our interest in writers like Qabbani and Adonis (pen name of Ali Ahmad Said)--both born in Syria but residents of Beirut until the 1980s when it too became uninhabitable for their free spirits--but then allows himself to digress into the general history of the region.

Next comes a chapter on Egypt, “The Saints and the Worldliness.” By saints, Ajami means the Islamists, but in fact he tells us very little about them. Instead we get a gallery of their secular opponents and victims: writers like Farag Foda, murdered in 1992, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid, forced into exile in 1996 when the Egyptian courts gave in to Islamist pressure and dissolved his marriage on grounds of apostasy. Here too, but only fleetingly, is Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist, who survived a stabbing in the neck in 1994. Ajami’s picture of the impoverishment of Egyptian culture is bleak indeed, with Mubarak’s drab regime as much to blame as Islamist terror. But Ajami, like many visitors to that “country with a remarkable record of political stability,” seems convinced that somehow the basic decency and resilience of the Egyptians will win through, despite all rational grounds for pessimism.

The final chapter, “The Orphaned Peace,” looks at the turmoil and dismay of Arab intellectuals faced with the Oslo peace process and the palpable relief of many of them when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s election in 1996 permitted a return to old simplicities. Oslo was bewildering in a way that Camp David was not because its Arab protagonists were the man and the organization that for a quarter of a century had been accepted as symbols of what the struggle was all about. Had the intellectuals not understood that all those resolutions enshrining the Palestine Liberation Organization as “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” were intended to let the Arab states off the hook by creating a body with the authority to absolve them of their obligations to that people? Perhaps they had, but few had realized how great an abdication of Palestinian rights would be involved in such a compromised peace, especially the rights of those who had lived in exile from their homes in Jaffa and Haifa since 1948 and to whom a mini-state, struggling to be born in the narrow spaces between Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, had very little to offer.

Arab writers may have had a special empathy for these Palestinian exiles because by the 1990s almost all of them were exiles too--many of them twice over, having first fled from Syria or Iraq or Arabia to Lebanon and then, as Beirut gradually self-destructed in the 1970s and ‘80s, to London or Paris or Harvard. Ajami, for his part, chose exile before the self-destruction began. He remains detached from the state of mind of those he is writing about. Most of them might find it hard to accept that he shares their pain, both at the loss of a country and at the broader crisis of Arab culture. To them, tears shed by the darling of the New Republic and the Washington talk shows can only be crocodile tears.

But perhaps they should look again at Ajami, as Ajami has looked again at Khalil Hawi. They might find a less self-assured, more tormented individual than they imagine.