Obituary of an ‘Arabist’ who knew no Arabic"Rana Kabbani is everything Patrick Seale was not. 
When in 2006, she wrote openly to demolish Hafez Assad’s ‘Corrective Movement’ that Seale had urged Bashar al-Assad to follow, and was banned from entering her country for that first critical article, Seale happily betrayed her stand, boarding planes bound for Damascus to dine with Assad, whom he continued to defend till his last breath. He never tired of belittling Kabbani’s far greater knowledge, or showing disdain for the refined and destroyed Middle East that had produced her, as it had so many highly-educated and erudite individual Arabs from liberal old families like hers.
Patrick Seale will be forgotten, except by people who share his worldview. They, too, are on the wrong side of history, and like him and his ‘scholarship’, will be proved irrelevant by the mammoth groundswell of Arabs seeking freedom from every sort of ideological tyranny, whether secular or religious."