This is the final post in a series of four in which I pose a question I’ve had about Arab culture and the Arab world for some time, and the information I was able to glean from Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, which I finished reading recently.
What challenges must the Arab world overcome to live at peace and improve their quality of life and standing in the world?
The Arab Mind offers the viewpoints of many Arab critics regarding the steps necessary to overcome the Arab world’s backwardness of the past many hundreds of years. The theme that keeps recurring—and this will not fall lightly on the ears of traditional or Islamist Arabs or their politically correct leftist friends in the West—is that of emulating Israel. How can it be that Israel—the greatest enemy of the Arab world—their whipping boy—the country they love to hate—has the answers to their stagnation woes?
On a linguistic level, Patai points out the development of ancient Hebrew to the much more grammatically precise modern form of the language. He claims that this same development is necessary to Arabic if it is to function as a clear mode of communication with those outside the Arab world, to “become more factual, rid itself of its traditional rhetoricism, its exaggeration and overassertion, and transform its perfect and imperfect verb forms into semantic equivalents of the past and future tenses respectively of Standard Average European.”
Socially speaking, according to Patai and some other Arab critics he cites, the position of women in Arab society needs to be improved. Female infant mortality rates, in contrast to that in non-Arab nations, is higher than that for males. Patai posits that factors contributing to this may include poorer care of girls as a result of the disappointment that accompanies their birth (since boys are favored markedly in Arab society), the continued practice in some places of clitoridectormy and its accompanying risk of infection and complications, and the high birth rate of Arab women, increasing the chance of death in childbirth (to 30 times higher than that of Western women). Education of girls, and access to work for women are also factors that need to be addressed. Even some Arab men have recognized that the continued physical, psychological, and educational impoverishment of women is unacceptable. Patai quotes Arab author Jurj Tarabishi as saying “that while people are wont to say that there are 100 million Arabs, this is wrong, for in fact there are only 50 million since the women are prevented from taking part in social responsibilities.” Patai himself writes that “as long as the mental faculties of the mother are hemmed in, encysted, and stunted by the illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition in which she is kept by the male-centered ethos of Arab culture, she will go on instilling into the minds of her sons and daughters the very same character traits, values, concepts, and ideals that have been so bitterly excoriated by Arab critics of the Arab personality…” Colonel DeAtkine, who penned the foreward to the book, writes, “There is no doubt that the cultural bondage in which women are held is one of the main causes of the stagnation of Arab society.” From his experience in Iraq, DeAtkine concludes that, “[f]ar more sensible and realistic than the men, [Arab women] are the key to cultural and political change in their world.”
Another area in which Patai and others observe that Arab society must improve is in the embrace of democracy, with its tenets of freedom including free speech and press, and the rule of law. Patai writes, “In an address in Kuwait, [Abdul Rahman Salim al-Atiqi, former Kuwaiti minister of finance and subsequently adviser to the Amir of Kuwait] deplored the ‘constant oppression’ in the Arab countries, and ‘regretfully’ noted that, by contrast, the Israelis enjoy freedom of opinion to the extent of being able to criticize their own leader.” Patai also records that “The correspondent of The New York Times in Kuwait, who reported the above speech, noted that it was remarkable ‘how many people, not only intellectuals, but mainstream government bureaucrats, say openly that the reason Israel keeps defeating the Arabs is not that the Arabs don’t have the resources but that their societies are not organized along democratic lines like Israel’s. Israel’s secret weapon, they say, is the strength that comes out of democratic action.’” While Israelis have been disgusted and discouraged over so many of their public figures and leaders in government being hauled into court in handcuffs for charges of corruption, graft, and even rape, many Arabs have watched the circus with envy and admiration for the Israelis’ system of justice which holds their leaders to account for their misdeeds. Israel’s freedom of the press is also not lost on our Arab neighbors. Khaled Abu Toameh, who writes for the Jerusalem Post, has commented that he has never once been told what to write by the Post’s editor, whereas journalists’ work is heavily monitored and censored by Hamas and the PA in Arab-occupied territory.
Scores of Arab critics of Arab society and culture have grudgingly admitted that for the Arab world to succeed in the modern world, it must learn from the Jews. One such critic, Dr. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid, in a book analyzing the reasons for the Israelis’ defeat of the Arabs in the Six Day War, writes that “‘[t]he Jews adhere to reality, study it in an objective, scientific manner, and act to adapt themselves to reality or to adapt reality to themselves. But we cling to fantasy, delusions delight us, and we passionately love to talk; but soon, how painfully and bitterly reality hits us in the face!’”
Observers of European history note that with the advent of the Renaissance, the embrace of science, and the humanistic writings of John Locke and others like him, religion was slowly fractured, and eventually eroded. While religion has not been eradicated, it has been weakened to the point that it no longer exercises nearly the influence it once did over government or human behavior. While many modern Arabs have relaxed the hold Islam has over them, most Muslim Arabs remain dedicated to the beliefs and practices of Islam. For them, the challenge lies in finding a way to balance their cultural and religious identity with the skills and knowledge necessary to take their place in the modern world.
As a personal observation, I have heard many in the Western world voice the opinion that Arabs are not ready for democracy, and are unsuited to it culturally. Such people regarded George W. Bush’s military engagements in Iraq as wasteful, futile, and motivated by unbecoming evangelical zeal. Its prosecution is worthy of scrutiny and sharp criticism, but I wonder if the attempt to spread democracy is really such an evil. Throughout the Arab world the level of poverty, ignorance, and isolation from the outside world is perpetuated among the poorer classes, while the oil-rich enjoy all that the modern world has to offer. The ruling class blames the West for its own failure to provide a life for its people, and the people, unaware of the true cause of their isolation and poverty (and culturally inclined to believe what their fellow Arabs tell them) take the bait. Those among the wealthy and (sometimes Western-) educated sector of society (e.g. the 9/11 bombers) blame the West for their feeling of ambivalence in Arab society, i.e. their elevated status and disengagement from the poor populace, but their inability to truly “fit in” with the Western society they have learned so much about. Jihadist Islam provides a violent, cathartic outlet for the rage this ambivalence sometimes engenders. To perpetuate the ignorance of the majority of the Arab population is to encourage the continued sense of alienation of the more educated in that society. The freedoms brought by democracy can be learned, just as they were by the colonists in America who knew them only from books of philosophy, but had never before experienced them. It is true that the societal norm in most Arab countries is marked by traditional values, strict separation of the sexes, where men have access to little education and women almost none, and where a culturally seeded fatalism preserves the status quo. But if that norm were to change, and opportunities for education and self-determination were to increase, then the demonstrations we have seen in Iran against their leadership, the joy of the Iraqis in tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein, and the fear and resentment of the Lebanese at being taken over by Hizbullah could be transformed into the kind of society the Arabs themselves admit to wishing for, where their leaders are held accountable for their crimes, where the press is free to print what it wants, even if it is not flattering to the government, and people are free to take to the streets without fear of being shot or beaten to death by the government’s thugs-for-hire.
This discussion of Raphael Patai’s book by no means acts as a thorough review of the book. There are dozens of other topics he discusses in detail, providing historical examples and the views of a range of Arab apologists and critics. For its sweeping examination of Arab culture and attitudes, and a window on why the Arabs have, as a group, chosen to adopt certain attitudes and behaviors toward each other, Israel, and the West, I found it invaluable. For its value to soldiers serving in the Middle East, Colonel DeAtkine praises it as a “field tested” book. He writes, “My former students, who were officers engaged on a daily basis with the Iraqis, found their cultural instruction to be invaluable and related to me many examples of Iraqi cultural traits described by Patai. The instruction helped them work with Arab leaders and better understand their ambivalence, methods of conflict resolution, sensitivities to loss of face, proclivities to excessive rhetoric and habit of substituting words for action, disinclination to accept responsibility as well as their traits of hospitality and generosity. These officers conducted thousands of successful meetings, settling disputes and averting crisis situations at village, tribal, and urban neighborhood levels—all of this unreported by the Western media. Such successes are, apparently, not sufficiently dramatic to garner media attention. Nevertheless, in the long run these positive incidents will have lasting influence on the people with whom they dealt, and will pay dividends long after this conflict has ended.”
This does not mean that Patai, while possessing a firm grasp of trends in Arab society and psychology, could anticipate every twist and turn history would make. When he wrote his last edition of this book, he saw slow progress in the Arab world, encouraged by small changes in education of women, in the example of Kuwait’s use of its oil money to create a successful welfare state (in the best sense of the word), and in the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. He apparently did not sense the undercurrents of hatred which have stirred those with extreme interpretations of Islam into a worldwide network of jihadist Islamic terrorists. That the defeat in 1967 (and again, if you look at the big picture, in 1973) should be the last open war declared against Israel, and that the struggle against both the Jewish State and the West should assume a new form with snipers shooting at motorists, suicide bombers, and Western-educated middle-class men flying planes into skyscrapers, clearly did not suggest itself to him. But perhaps like many Westerners, he was unable to connect the dots between attacks on the West by Arabs and see not the isolated actions of a few disturbed individuals, but a trend which was escalating over time in both scale and sophistication. Or perhaps as a passionate scholar of the Arabs, he chose not to see it. (He died in 1996.) Yet despite its limitations, I think this book is an excellent starting-point for those who wish to understand the Arab world better.
Shimshonit 
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