“Once mellowed and moldering, the far-flung civilization of the Arabs is being swept today by invigorating winds of change. A fruitful kind of disorder is replacing the old fixed patterns of life.” Those contemporary-sounding words were published in 1962, in a glossy, picture-laden, 160-page book titled The Arab World.

The volume boasts three virtues that make it worth a review a precise half-century later. First, the editors of Life magazine, then the outstanding American weekly, produced it, implying cultural centrality. Second, a retired senior State Department official, George V. Allen, wrote the introduction, pointing to the book’s establishment credentials. Third, Desmond Stewart (1924-1981), an acclaimed British journalist, historian, and novelist, wrote the text.

The Arab World emphatically represents an artifact from another era; while not entirely sugar-coating his subject matter, Stewart offers a benign, gauzy, patronizing approach that would gag even the most euphemistic writers today. For example, he suggests that a Western visitor to the Arabic-speaking countries enters “the realm of Aladdin and Ali Baba. The people remind him of his illustrated Bible.” One encounters little of this sentimentality in the age of Al-Qaeda.

More interestingly, the book demonstrates how easily a prominent analyst can misread the big picture.

As suggested by its title, one theme concerns the existence of a single Arab people from Morocco to Iraq, a people so tradition bound that Stewart resorts to an animal analogy: “the Arabs possess a distinctive common culture which they can no more throw off than a hummingbird can change its nesting habits to those of a thrush.” Ignoring the Arabs’ failed record to unify their countries, Stewart predicted that “whatever happens, the forces for [Arab] union will remain.” Hardly: that urge died not long after 1962 and has long remained defunct, as has its shallow premise that the Arabic language alone defines a people, ignoring history and geography.