Review Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives by Laura Robson

Abstract

The Arab World continues to be too often gazed upon as though it were a monolith, despite decades of knowledge production aiming for the subversion of such reductive yet tenacious views. The very phrase “The Arab World,” which remains the proper expression used to refer to the region, suggests a singular world of its own, separate and insular, but also consistent in its peculiar features. The implication is not only that it is distinct from other “Worlds” (including, presumably, the “Western World”), but also that its inhabitants are the same wherever they are found across a remarkably vast geography, and of whatever walk of life they may be, while attributes such as complexity, diversity, and heterogeneity are the monopoly of The West. This is the sort of outlook that this book of essays edited by Laura Robson challenges by contributing new perspectives on the various manners in which “minority,” as an identity, functions in an Arab context.