'People of the Book' Review: Through a Glass, Rosily

Writing in 1993, the Syrian intellectual Georges Tarabichi (d. 2016) criticized his fellow Arab thinkers for projecting present-day values onto their study of Arab history. In his book "The Altar of Heritage in Contemporary Arab Culture," he argued that these thinkers, when contemplating the sad state of the modern Arab world, suffer a great narcissistic injury and feel the need to compensate for it. "We look into the past," he wrote, "through the mirror of our current shortcomings and failures, and our imperative need for personal recompense, thereby gaining all the dignity that we lack in our current reality." In short, "we idealize our past to the exact extent that our current despair pains us."