About a dozen years ago, a bitter joke circulated in the Arab diaspora: “Q: Why are there no Arabs on Star Trek? A: Because the show is about the future, silly.” Strictly speaking, the self-parody was inaccurate; the current king of Jordan, ʿAbd Allah II, had made a brief appearance on Star Trek: Voyager in the mid-1990s, a few years before ascending to the throne. But the joke did capture the sense of failure, despair, and narrowed horizons that had taken hold of many Arabs following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the launching of the Iraq War in 2003—a feeling that the Arabs’ heyday lay in a swiftly receding past. Nathan J. Citino's outstanding book, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.–Arab Relations, 1945–1967, captures a very different moment: a time when a restless and vibrant Arab people, stepping out of the shadow of European domination, seemed poised to play a vital role in the unfolding drama of postwar modernity; a time, moreover, when US policymakers and planners shared that sense of potential and vigorously engaged with their Arab counterparts to shape the region's future.

Citino's book joins a growing scholarly literature on the theory and practice of modernizing efforts around the globe during the quarter century following World War II. What distinguishes his contribution is its contention that, at least in Arab societies, modernization was not a unilateral Western imposition but, rather, a shared discourse among US and Arab elites. Throughout the book, Citino documents influential Americans’ and Arabs’ common faith in technology, linear progress, and top-down reform of tradition-bound societies. He shows how these figures, regardless of their ideology—or of their sharp political disputes with one another—saw speed and air travel as the ultimate signifiers of progressive modernity, “shared assumptions about development” (p. 214), and agreed “about the dangers of too much democracy” in societies presumed to be unready for self-governance (p. 225). Citino is critical of this last notion, and his transnational framework allows for a rational and equitable apportioning of blame. “If elites with different ideologies shared an antidemocratic concept of social change,” he writes, “then historians can hold individuals responsible for the human costs of pursuing such ideologies without falling back on easy explanations based on the supposedly essential traits of Arabs or any other people” (p. 289).

Another of Citino's original arguments concerns the influence of academic scholarship on modernizing schemes, whether American or Arab. Whereas the political scientist James C. Scott has urged scholars to “see like a state” and thus gain insight into the destructive hubris of “high-modernist ideology,” Citino's focus, one might say, is on the efforts of statist modernizers to “see like scholars” (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998], 4). The author shows that, in the 1950s, US diplomats and oil executives drew deeply on historical studies of Ottoman reform measures of the 19th century, regarding them as models for modernizing the Arab world. In the following decade, the State Department Arabist William Polk engaged in an extended dialogue with Egyptian opinion leaders over the direction of state-run modernization in that country. Polk was heavily influenced by the Lebanese historian Asad Rustum's work on the 19th-century Egyptian ruler Muhammad ʿAli Pasha, whose armies had occupied parts of the Levant and reshaped them in ways that supposedly prefigured later state-building programs. (Citino also uses the Polk case to challenge historians’ prevailing view that US–Egyptian relations sharply deteriorated in the 1960s. It is certainly true that those relations were multidimensional. At the very time that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir were growing to despise one another, ʿAbd al-Nasir was enthusing to Polk about The Stages of Economic Growth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960], the bible of modernization theory penned a few years earlier by the economist Walt W. Rostow, who would soon serve as Johnson's national security adviser.)

Similarly, Citino demonstrates that American and Arab modernizers were keenly aware of, and made serious attempts to answer, the sorts of criticisms that academics would later direct at statist initiatives in the Arab world and elsewhere. He challenges scholars such as Scott and Timothy Mitchell, who have portrayed government development schemes as arrogant impositions on powerless local communities. Discussing state-sponsored model villages in Arab countries in the early postwar decades, Citino writes that many of those communities “were the result of an unequal but nevertheless important exchange between state and society. . . . Far from ignoring local knowledge, planners compiled, scrutinized, and brandished it as a defense against charges of paternalism” (p. 99). Indeed, Egypt's planned communities became an arena of competition among the various individuals who spearheaded them, some with official Egyptian or US support, others under private auspices. Each planner touted his own approach as an authentic expression of Egyptian village life and dismissed the schemes of his rivals as insensitive intrusions into that hallowed sphere. Whatever their merits, Citino writes, these contending “claims to respect local knowledge reflected the imperatives of postcolonial politics and cannot be dismissed as mere pretense” (p. 141).

In the final chapter, Citino explores how the turbulent politics of the late 1960s brought an end “to the postwar era's optimistic pursuit of modernization” by Americans and Arabs alike. Just as the Vietnam debacle suggested that “the United States could no longer credibly claim to offer the third world a successful model to emulate” (p. 252), so the disastrous Arab defeat in the 1967 war discredited the existing Arab order, exposing it to attack from both the Palestinian left and the Islamist right (as well as to top-down erosion from a new neoliberal center, as seen in the pragmatic economic policies of the Egyptian and Syrian governments in the 1970s). The book's discussion of the radical challenge is especially captivating. The Palestinian militants who hijacked state-of-the-art commercial airliners in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Citino writes, were targeting the quintessential symbol of technological progress and elite authority; in doing so, they expressed their rejection of a regional and global status quo that could deliver neither prosperity nor justice. In The Stages of Economic Growth, Rostow famously used the metaphor of the “take-off” to describe the surge of economic dynamism that awaited any society that followed his policy prescriptions. Here, then, was the ultimate take-down of the Rostovian vision.

There is much more I could say about this remarkable book, which brings a host of often unfamiliar Arab voices to a Western audience and contains striking, novel insights on nearly every page. Instead, I will simply urge readers to get hold of Envisioning the Arab Future and discover its contents for themselves. Precisely because it is so rich, the work requires of its readers a measure of concentration. Those willing to provide it will be amply rewarded.