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The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009. 

5.  Modernization Theory and the History of the Modern Middle East

However, that was not the only option.  One of the most significant books to present the idea of “modern” for countries in the region was Bernard Lewis’s book The Emergence of Modern Turkey written in 1961.   It was an overwhelming success at the time, because not only did it give you a history of the Ottoman empire from the 19th to the 20th century, and the succeeding Republic of Turkey, but it give you a concept of what “modern” was.   He was not speaking specifically about a time period, but of what “modernity” meant.   What is the process by which people in Turkey are becoming “modern”?   It was the story of reform, Westernization, a whole series of quite well-described actions taken by rulers in the 19th and 20th century to discard the “traditional” way of life and to replace it with a “modern” way of life.   Contemporary with that work was the The Passing of Traditional Society:  Modernizing the Middle East by Daniel Lerner written in 1964.   It suggested that modernization is a precisely describable process by which each part of the world at its own pace will become more like … America.

The notion of a modern Middle East country meaning “a state controlled by the British” had involved into the idea of a country undergoing a process of modernization.  Theorizing about this process resulted in something called “modernization theory”.   The history of the modern Middle East was essentially eclipsed by modernization theory until the time of the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s.

The most recent edition of Bernard Lewis’ book The Emergence of Modern Turkey contains a preface describing how he came to write the book.   He felt a thrill in 1950 when Turkey had its first open election and the ruling party lost, but then peacefully ceded power to its opponent.   Even 50 years later, Lewis felt he could still remember the thrill he felt at the modern Middle East emerging in the results of this election.

By the time his book had been written in 1961, that government had been overthrown in a military coup, but Lewis’ vision never wavered.   In his book written in 2003, What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, Lewis basically is lamenting the fact that the Middle East did not continue to develop along the lines he thought it would back in the 1950s.

Modernization theory which took over is perhaps a little bit difficult to grasp today, but if you take a look at the book by Daniel Lerner, you will see that it was based on public opinion polls that were conducted in a number of countries in the Middle East.   90% of the questions in the polls deal with listening to radio and reading newspapers, because part of modernization theory was that people becoming modern by becoming exposed to modern media.   That’s why he weighted his polling questions so heavily towards them.   And he also weighed the opinions of those who got their news from modern media more heavily than those that did not.Modernization theory dominated Modern Middle East theory, but the period during which modernization theory was predominant was ironically the period during which the most important seminal works by Islamic thinkers were published.   No American graduate student working on Modern Middle East theory ever studied those authors based on one of the most important concepts of modernization theory, which was that religion would become more and more obsolete, and people would replace it with a “civic religion” based on the state.   Islam was vanishing, according to this view.

6.   The Re-Emergence of Islam in the Modern Middle East

Modern Middle East was born after World War II, but it had some serious birth defects, and these defects became apparent during the 1970s.   Getting people to realize what was happening was difficult.   From 1973 to 1975, Prof. Bulliet taught at Berkeley and was a colleague of Dr. Hamid Algar who was an expert on political Islam.   He had been born as Rodney (?) Algar but had converted to Islam in Iran.  He gained enormous respect in the Muslim community and had extensive connections with Muslim political activists, particularly in Iran.

Prof. Bulliet learned a lot from him and they were among a tiny handful of American scholars who could see what was going down in the area before the Iranian revolution.   It was clear that you had people here in the United States who were planning to participate in the revolution.   Prof. Bulliet remembered attending a conference at UCLA and he later discovered that all the Iranian students in attendance received a phone call from a man named Kolte Zadek (?) who said “meet me under the Pasadena freeway at such-and-such an exit, I’ll be wearing a red carnation and carrying helium balloons.”   It was all very conspiratorial.   He was trying to lure the students into the revolution against the Shah of Iran.   The Iranian scholars who were in the United States at that time were a group of people who had come to this country to do graduate studies and had been part of the anti-Shah underground students association and had decided that the revolution wasn’t going to happen.   They made a choice:  either they could go home and work for the revolution or stay in the United States and become professors.   None of them he could think of quit their jobs and joined the revolution, and when it came, they were devastated.   They had started out as revolutionaries, and now that the revolution was actually happening, they were just professors.   What a demeaning situation to end up in as a revolutionary; on the other hand, they’re all still alive.

You could see what was happening if you knew where to look.   Prof. Bulliet had an advantage because his research was mainly in Medieval Middle East history and so he knew a lot about Islam.    He was absolutely convinced that what was happening in the Middle East with regard to Islam was going to change history.   But the modernists didn’t know anything about Islam, and so they were caught unprepared and missed a lot of what was going on.

Prof. Bulliet visited Israel in 1980 and there was a conference where he gave a talk saying that the revolution of Iran and the rise of political Islam was the most important historical trend in the Middle East and it would be one that would affect the rest of their lives.    The intellectual elite all denounced Prof. Bulliet and had the newspapers write articles extremely critical of his views.   He was in the airport in Tel Aviv and he saw his picture on the cover of an Israeli newspaper and so he casually sidled over to the person reading the article and asked him what the article was about.  “Oh, it’s some stupid American that says Islam is important.”

If you were into modernization theory, if you saw history as a path or trajectory and you knew where the path would lead, your job was simply to identify the entities that were moving along that path, and show how they were gradually making progress towards American-style perfection.  They didn’t know what to do with the revolution in Iran.  People in the Middle East who sucked up to America, i.e., virtually every government, told Americans what Americans what they wanted to hear, namely that Shiites were fanatics but that Sunni Muslims were peaceful.  When Kareem Abdul-Jabbar converted to Sunni Islam from the Nation of Islam, that was the first time when the word “Sunni” became introduced to the American public.  So there was a general image that the “Sunni” Muslims were the “good” Muslims.

Although people in the government would tell the US that the Sunnis were the “peaceful” Muslims, they knew that this wasn’t always true.  Around 1982, Prof. Bulliet went on one of his first trips to Saudi Arabia, and he was in a conversation with an official in the Interior Ministry.  He asked the official whether he could ask about religious resistance to the Saudi regime, and he said there was.  In the Eastern province there were a lot of Shiites, and they were potentially revolutionary and so they were making sure that everybody in that area had appliances in their homes and paved roads, etc., to keep them happy.  Prof. Bulliet said he wasn’t asking about the Shiites, he was asking about the Sunnis.  He responded that there wasn’t any resistance; nobody about the Sunnis was opposed to the kingdom.  Prof. Bulliet said he would take that message back to the United States where he knew of students in secret cells in Texas who were plotting to overthrow the Kingdom and they were all Sunnis.  (He didn’t share any names with the official, of course…)

There was a tremendous amount of denial about the importance of Islam prior to and immediately after the Iranian revolution.  And yet, what Islam has become in political terms, in the balance of world strategic affairs, not to mention in personal terms for individual Muslims, is what is central to the Middle East now.  The problem is you can’t explain that centrality or even begin to guess at it by reading standard books on Modern Middle Eastern history, because they start with different premises.  They were based on the rise of nation-states, or they were interested in the process of modernity, or more parochially interested in the political fortunes of a certain ruler.

Tomorrow I will post Prof. Bulliet’s final remarks in the lecture, where he draws a remarkable parallel between the United States and Saudi Arabia when it comes to the role of fundamentalist religious movements.

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The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009.  

3.  The Concept of Civilizations in Middle East History

Arnold Toynbee wrote a book in 1922 called The Western Question in Greece and Turkey which covered the struggle between who would control the Western portion of Greece in the aftermath of World War I.  The subtitle of his work was “A Study in the Contact of Civilizations”.    This is one of the first times that it was postulated that civilizations, as opposed to countries or states, were in some sort of relationship.

Basil Matthews, an important official in the YMCA, wrote a widely appreciated book in 1922 called The Book of Missionary Heroes detailing the lives of those Christian missionaries who had given their lives for the sake of bringing Christianity to various countries in the world.   Matthews wrote a book in 1925 called Young Islam on Track. The subtitle was:  A study in the clash of civilizations.    His book was a deliberate reaction to the more neutral term “Contact of Civilizations” that had been used by Toynbee three years earlier.

Bernard Lewis used the term “Clash of Civilizations” in his essay The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990) published in The Atlantic Monthly, where he argued that the struggle between the West and Islam was gathering strength.   According to one source, this essay (and Lewis’ 1990 Jefferson Lecture on which the article was based) first introduced the term “Islamic fundamentalism” to the general public in North America, and has also been credited with coining the phrase “clash of civilizations“.   Another source said he had first used the phrase “clash of civilizations” at a meeting in Washington in 1957 where it was recorded in the transcript.

Whether Bernard Lewis got the phrase “clash of civilizations” from Matthews or not, Samuel Huntington wrote the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996, based on a theory he originally formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, and then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled  “The Clash of Civilizations?”, in response to Francis Fukuyama‘s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.

You have here the idea that there was something in the region that wasn’t simply the modern nation-state coming into being, which had been suggested in Lord Cromer’s history of Modern Egypt or a book written later in 1931 by Henry Dodwell called the Founder of Modern Egypt: a Study of Muhammad ‘Ali.

4.  Regional histories of the Middle East

When did the idea of having a generalized history of the region start?   There was a book written in the 1938 by George Antonius, a Lebanese Christian, called The Arab Awakening.  This was one of many books about history that originated in Lebanese Christian circles that portrayed the “Renaissance of the Arabs” as going back to the middle of the 19^th century.   It focused rather heavily on the American University of Beirut which was founded by missionaries and which many of these historians had attended or taught at.   They associated the Renaissance with the literary and intellectual book that had been carried out largely by Arab Christians.

This irritated certain Muslim Arabs, such as Abdul Talif Tibawi, who wrote A modern history of Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine in 1969.   One of his objectives in his book was to show that the Arab Christians were not the only people who created an Arab Renaissance or a new era in Arab History.   What you have, from George Antonius’ book The Arab Awakening to A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani (2002), is an identification of Middle Eastern history with the Arabs.

Tomorrow I will post about Prof. Bulliet’s remarks on the concept of “modernization theory” that was prevalent in academic circles from the 1950s until the end of the 1970s, and how it was eclipsed by the rise of political Islam, in particular the Iranian revolution.

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The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009.  

There are two problems in covering the “History of the Modern Middle East”; one is the concept of “modern” and the other is the “Middle East”.   There are no histories written before the 1950s which would suggest putting these two terms together.

1.   The concept of “modern”

The word “modern” has ambiguities.   Is modern history of the concept of “modernity” in a certain area or does it simply refer to a time period.   In the past, if you asked a Professor who taught Modern Middle Eastern history at one point in history they start their course, most would reply “starting with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaporte in 1798”.   Nowadays, this would get you labeled as an Orientalist, because what you are doing is defining the start of the Modern period in the Middle East based on the point in time when it was invaded by an outside power.   In reality, the French were only there 3 years.

But if not with the invasion by Napoleon, when does it begin?  How do you define what is modern?   Does the modern intrinsically mean “Euro-American”?   Does it come from the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the French and then the American Revolution?   Does it start in Europe and the United States and then spread to other areas?   In that case, the term “modern” can actually refer to different time periods when you deal with different areas, because these ideas diffused to different parts of the world at different times.

In effect, this means that “modern” means “the point where the Europeans politically and economically start to impact the region”.

Or, does it refer to ideas or movements that occur within each region, and to which one can assign the label “modern”?    For example, A Modern History of the Muslim World, by Reinhard Schulze, according to the review on Amazon, “provides a clear overview of the ways in which twentieth century modernism affected the societies of the Islamic world and how modernism was developed from an Islamic perspective.”

The use of the word “modern” as applied to Western scholarship regarding the Middle East, first applies to individual countries, and then it applies to Islam before it is applied to the entire region.   For example, a work in 1908 called Modern Egypt was written by Evelyn Baring Cromer or Lord Cromer, who was the British consul-general in Egypt.   His history is basically that during the period of his administration of Egypt.

Another example, is the book Four Centuries of Modern Iraq written in 1925 by Stephen Helmsley Longrigg.   Prof. Bulliet always thought this was one of the most intriguing titles of a book on the Middle East:   how could Modern Iraq go back as far as 1525, at the time of Suleiman the Magnificent?   In reality, the title means that he is considering the area that consisted of three separate provinces of the Ottoman Empire that was then designated by the victorious Allied powers as “Modern Iraq” in the aftermath of World War I.   He discussed the historical events happened within that area during the previous four centuries, so in reality it is a history of the portion of the Ottoman Empire that is now considered Iraq.

Although these are two examples of books with the term “modern” applied to individual countries, there were no books that discussed the concept of the “modern” that covered the entire region.

2.  The concept of the “Middle East”

Another term rarely used before the 1950s was the “Middle East”.   The “Near East” or “Levant” were terms that were far more commonly used to refer to the region.   “Near East” was used primarily to refer to the countries that had been under control by the Ottoman Empire prior to World War I:  Turkey, portions of Europe, and the portions of the Arab World not under control by Britain or France.   The term “Middle East” became standard after World War II.   It came about in the following way:  in the course of the war, the Germans came to occupied countries in southeastern Europe such as Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania that had previously been part of the Ottoman Empire.  When the British were defending the region, they didn’t want to use the term Near East, because part of the Ottoman Empire was under control by the Germans.

To support Turkey which was neutral in the war, and the English-dominated Arab countries, the British set up something called the Middle East Supply Center in Cairo, Egypt.  This became the key administrative center for the British and later on the American war effort against the Germans in the region.   That was not the only source for the popularity of the term “Middle East”, but it was an important one.    So the term “Middle East” came into more general use after World War II.

The notes for this lecture are continued on subsequent posts.

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This is dedicated to the Homewood-Flossmoor High School class of ’75, and particularly those such as Tina Landry Otte and Scott Tomlinson that facilitated the recent reunions.

I was recently invited to join a high-school reunion back in my hometown of Homewood, Illinois.   I was not able to make it because I learned about the event with too short notice to be able to attend this time around.

However, one of my classmates, Scott Tomlinson, arranged for a regional “mini-reunion” for those Homewood-Flossmoor (HF) graduates from the class of ’75 who live in the Southern California area.  

On Tuesday, April 17^th, I drove down from Los Angeles and met with Scott Tomlinson and his son Erik, Marty Leonard, and Richard Carroll at an Italian restaurant in the Little Italy section of downtown San Diego.   We had a great meal and had a wonderful time reminiscing for about 3 hours.  Marty mentioned that he thought we were starting to look younger as the evening progressed; he attributed it to the wine some of us were drinking. 

On the way home, I realized that what Marty was saying was true:  I felt a vitality that I had not felt for a long time by reliving events and memories from that intense time of our lives.   I was casting about in my mind for an image to explain how I felt, and I finally discovered one.  

A pearl is made by a piece of grit or sand which gets lodged in the shell of the oyster.   The oyster then secretes a substance to protect itself against the irritation caused by that piece of sand, and this secretion then hardens to become a pearl.   In a way, we were experiencing the process in reverse.   Our personalities were like pearls that formed at the time of our childhood, and hardened during the years in high school.   Our core being was intense and translucent as we graduated high school, but then years of the experiences of life have covered them with grit and sand which sometimes have obscured that light within.  

But then our conversations about the fun times we had and the crazy things we did acted like a sandblaster and I saw that pearl of personality shine forth again.   As Scott, Marty, and Rich and I talked about cars, dances, football games and other events that constellated our emotional lives back then, I could see that the essential spark of being that was reflected in our eyes and our smiles was as strong as it was back then, although our bodies and minds may have aged.

We were unique both as individuals and as a class, given the unique point of time when we graduated in relation to the flow of historical events of this country.   It was a privilege of a lifetime to be who we were; and I wanted to thank Scott, Tina and all of the others that have tried to contact the classmates of the class of ’75 in order to help us realize that.   

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At the time being, China is heavily dependent on coal, with only 4% of energy consumption coming from natural gas.   However, there are two factors that are boosting the demand for LNG in China:

1)  the rapid demand for petroleum products in general for consumption by industry and consumers (i.e., rising ownership of automobiles), and

2)  environmental concerns, due to the fact that gas is relatively cleaner-burning than coal

The spectacular growth in consumption (from 87 Bcm in 2009 to 200 Bcm in 2013) will mean a sharp increase in imports (125 Bcm in 2020 to 212 Bcm by 2035).   For this reason, China is taking the following steps:

1)  currently securing supplies of gas from Central Asia (from Turkmenistan), Myanmar, and Russia,

2)  increasing LNG regasification terminals from 4 currently operating to 10

3)  exploring supply options from Asia-Pacific, and East Africa

Although China is still developing unconventional sources for gas (60-100 Bcm in shale gas by 2020), and has coal bed methane, China’s insatiable demand will end up shifting the demand in the global gas market from the OECD countries to Asia.

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1.  Reliance on imports

In Europe, as opposed to the US, oil production is in decline, and shale gas is not yet an option as it is in the US, so imports of oil and gas are required.  (BCM = billion cubic meters)

By 2020 consumption 627 BCM, production 259 BCM, with a shortfall of 368 BCM.

By 2035 consumption 671 BCM, production 204 BCM, with a shortfall of 467 BCM.

This shows the increasing reliance on Europe for imports of petroleum products.

2.  Import sources

Europe is located close to vast resources of natural gas, but geopolitics complicates access to some of these resources.   Iran is a source of petroleum products that could be available to the EU, but EU has decided not to accept imports from Iran in order to participate in the sanctions imposed by the US.   (For details, please refer to my earlier blog post    https://4squareviews.com/2012/04/09/iran-sanctions-just-right-or-a-step-too-far/).

There are currently three import sources that are under development.

1)  Nord Stream, originating in Russia, which is scheduled for completion in 2012 with a capacity of 55 BCM (billion cubic meters)

2) Nabucco, originating in Iraq and Turkmenistan, which is scheduled for completion in 2014 with a capacity of 31 BCM.

3)  South Stream, originating in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, which is scheduled for completion in 2015 with a capacity of 63 BCM.

3.  Shale oil potential

There is shale gas potential in Europe (France, Poland, and Norway) and in North Africa (Algeria and Libya).   However, shale gas in Europe unlikely to develop in the same way as in the US.   It will be available but in the longer term compared to the US (after 2015).

One of the reasons for this is that there is relatively more pressure on the governments of the EU regarding  environmental effects of shale gas production than there is in the US.

Tomorrow I will post on the portion of the webinar dealing with the oil and gas market in China.

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On April 13th, 2012, Peter Kiernan, the Energy Analyst of the Economist Intelligence Unit, put on a webinar on the current state of supply and demand with respect to oil and gas in North America, Europe, and China.   The following are my notes of the webinar; I’m splitting the post into three parts, covering the three areas covered by the webinar as mentioned above.   I do not have a separate post for the Q&A session after the webinar as I had with previous EIU seminars, because I did not have a recording of that session available.   

Here are some trends with regard to natural gas in the United States, and its effect on other fossil fuels (oil, coal) and renewable energy sources.

1.  Shale gas boom

Shale gas is different than shale oil in that the natural gas is usually on top of a reservoir of shale oil, which usually means that it is more accessible than shale oil.

In the United States, natural gas production was on the decline before 2006, and was expected to become a major importer of LNG (liquefied natural gas), particularly from Canada.

However, since then proven shale gas reserves have increased and gas production itself has increased, to the point where shale gas now comprises 25% of total US gas production.   The supply has increased to the point where US is now expecting LNG.   Several LNG supply deals have concluded and LNG export terminals are under construction.

The shale gas boom and the relatively weak demand have led to lower prices for shale gas, and consequently a cut on production.

2.  Effect on shale oil

The shale oil that is more accessible is that found in tight or densely packed shale formations called light, tight oil or LTO.   Often this LTO is found in conjunction with natural gas which tends to rise to the top of the formation.   The gas production mentioned in paragraph 1 has therefore had a spillover effect on the increased production of LTO.   High oil prices make it profitable at this time to go after this type of oil.

Both shale gas and shale oil are considered unconventional supplies because they rely on methods such as fracking (or fracturing) of the shale in order to release the oil and gas contained therein.   High oil prices make the additional costs of these unconventional methods more economically viable.

3.  Effect on coal

As the US oil and gas production increase, the US dependence on coal production to meet its energy demands decreases.

4.  Effect on renewable energy

The lower prices on the production side (note we are not talking about lower gas prices that you are paying for at the gasoline pump) mean that renewable energy sources do have a role, but economic forces do not give incentive towards their development in the absence of government subsidies.

5.  Environmental scrutiny

One of the issues affecting oil and gas production in the US is the increasing environmental scrutiny attached to the fracking process, with the main short-term environmental hazards being the potential contamination of groundwater and increased earthquakes in production areas adjacent to fault lines, not to mention the long-term environmental hazards having to do with increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its effect on climate patterns.

This increasing environmental scrutiny may pressure the US government to factor in some of these environmental impacts into decisions regarding the implementation of further shale development projects.     However, absent this political pressure, economic forces now favor an increased shift in the US from coal and oil production towards the production of natural gas, which is a relatively cleaner-burning fossil fuel.

Tomorrow I will post on the effect of shale gas and oil production in the EU.

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The third literary style is the epic style where the writer presents the object in mediate relation to the (other) object(s).    This means that the writer presents the objects or facts while adding a layer of commentary or explanation, which mediates or interprets them.   This style is in direct contrast with the dramatic style (explained in part 2) that has no extra layer of commentary.   “Here are the facts, ma’am, and here’s what they mean.”   It focuses on the second-person viewpoint, as if the writer is addressing the audience with his comments.   Joseph Campbell in his lectures on James Joyce stated that Thomas Mann liked the epic style for his writings.   He compared James Joyce to Thomas Mann because they both used mythology in service of literature but used different literary styles to create their own unique “voice” in telling a story.

An example of the epic style from blogs regarding the Middle East would be from Informed Comment, the blog by Prof. Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.   In his blog post of April 18^th, he is describing a recent appearance of Republican strategist David Frum on Erin Burnett’s program on CNN on April 17^th.   He was stating the points where he agreed with David Frum, and the points where he disagreed with him.  But then he explained why he disagreed with him.

For example, he stated that David Frum was of the opinion that President Obama could affect the price of petroleum by offering more clarity on his Iran policy.   Prof. Cole disagreed with him, saying that the clarity of that policy is exactly what was contributing to higher prices, but he then went on to explain his position.   The policy of a financial embargo on the sale of Iranian petroleum sends a clear signal to an oil futures trader that Iranian petroleum will be taken off the market, and that future prices will rise.

So Prof. Cole says that President Obama’s policy should rather be more ambiguous to avoid such a negative signal to the market.   You may agree or disagree with his position, but you are in an informed position to comment on Prof. Cole’s opinion because he took the time to explain how he came to his conclusion.

I think this style is good for someone who is explaining a complex subject matter to those who may not be experts but rather educated laymen who are trying to learn about it.   In reality, however, a person may use both the epic or dramatic styles when blogging, with the dramatic or “newspaper” style used for tweets or for snapshots of a conference, let’s say, and the epic or “commentary” style used for longer blog posts or for explaining the topic to a general audience.

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The second literary style you can use when blogging is the dramatic style where the writer presents the objects in direct relation to the other objects.   This means that the writer presents the facts in an objective manner without any explanation or commentary.  “Just the facts, ma’am.”  It focuses on the third-person viewpoint, and is what we think of as the “newspaper” voice.   

According to Joseph Campbell, James Joyce used the dramatic style for his work, which meant that he would describe in objective terms what the characters were doing, saying, or even thinking.   However, the drawback of not adding the author’s commentary on those descriptions is that the reader sometimes finds it hard to follow what is going on.

An example from blogs regarding the Middle East would be the blog post on April 16th on the Angry Arab News Service written by Prof. As’ad AbuKhalil, professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus and visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley.   It stated “All websites of Lebanese government have been hacked” without any further comment of explanation.   This is simply a statement of fact which can be independently verified.   He gives links to those websites so people can check it out for themselves.  Now I’m sure he has a subjective opinion about this incident but they are not stated in the post itself.  

I find this mode of blogging among experts who are doing blog posts or especially in tweets to each other.  They don’t have the space in 140 characters to provide explanations, and they usually don’t need to provide them if they are sending to people who are already “in the know”.   So I find this to be a good mode of blogging if you are trying to describe the events in a neutral of non-partisan manner, or if you are writing for a sophisticated audience for whom explanation might be superfluous.   

In reality, however, dramatic style is often mixed with the epic style, which I will describe in tomorrow’s post. 

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For someone who is starting to write a blog, it is important to try to find one’s own unique personal style.  In trying to come up with a style that fits my personality and my purpose for writing, I first look at the definition of three literary styles or genres based on definitions given by Joseph Campbell in his lectures on James Joyce entitled Wings of Art.   Then I locate examples of each of these styles in blogs regarding the Middle East that I have either followed in the past or am following now.   Finally I discuss why one might want to use these styles for one’s blogs or tweets.

The first style is lyric style, which is defined by Joseph Campbell in his lecture on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the style where the writer presents the object in direct relation to the subject.   This means the writer is using words that give clues to what the writer is feeling or experiencing.   It focuses on the “I” or “subjective viewpoint” of the writer.

Examples from blogs regarding the Middle East are the blogs that I read during the Iraq war that were written by ordinary Iraqis themselves:   Baghdad Burning by Riverbend, and Where is Raed? by Salam Pax.   These are pseudonyms of Iraqis who lived in Iraq during the time of the Iraq war.   Their blog posts were collected into books, respectively “Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq” and “Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi”.  Their subjective impressions of the war in Iraq as it was being waged around them were invaluable for me in understanding what the average Iraqi experienced during the war.

The lyric style is good for reporting on events when you’re experiencing some special event.  If you’re describing ordinary life, however, then this will be entertaining or informative for readers or tweets or blogs only if they care about you personally.

Tomorrow, I will talk about the epic or narrative style of blogging.

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