ShrinkWrapped

The Trouble with Islam: Part I

In the New York Times yesterday, Michael Slackman wrote a long piece looking at the difficult task of being Young and Arab in Land of Mosques and Bars, in Dubai.  The piece hints at some important issues though, in the nature of a newsmagazine piece, is relatively superficial.  I plan on addressing the article more directly tomorrow, but as a preamble, would like to discuss some of the developmental tendencies in Arab culture that provide the substrate for the kinds of difficulties described in the article.  The focus in the article is on the tension felt by ambitious young Egyptian men who move to Dubai to take part in the exuberant life there (the vibrant economic and social possibilities) and the sense of dislocation they feel coming from the stagnant Egyptian quasi-theocracy to the free wheeling "wild West" atmosphere of Dubai.  My interest is to examine the intersection of the personal with the larger societal conflicts found within the Middle East.

Dubai's freedom and license present particular problems for young men who grow up in traditional Arab homes.  This relates to the ways in which Arab culture attempts to civilize their boys.  Civilizing one's sons is a task shared by all cultures but with very different approaches in the Arab world from the West.

One of the most important aspects of male childhood development concerns the "taming of the drives."  Boys typically have much greater levels of aggressive and sexual energy than girls and have a commensurately more difficult time taming their passions.  A culture that fails to assist their young men in the task of controlling their passions is a culture that is unstable and prone to violence. 

Traditionally, boys have learned to control their tempers and appetites, in part, through religion.  In this not all religions are equivalent.  Judaism and Christianity focus on the inner world of the youngster.  Sin is an inescapable risk, and atonement for harming others is paramount in both religious traditions.  As well, the need to look within and find fault within, is also an important part of religious instruction for children raised in the Judeo-Christian culture.  The adolescent, especially, receives help from religion in curbing his most dangerous impulses (toward violence, or perverse* sexuality, for instance.)  Judaism and Christianity provide a framework and structure whereby unacceptable impulses can receive assistance from an external buttress in the difficult task of managing intense impulses.  For this reason, it is not at all uncommon for adolescents to pass through a time of heightened religiosity and asceticism on the way to young adulthood, when their aggressive drives tend to ameliorate and their adult executive apparatus (the ego) can better handle the intensity of the drives.

[*I am using perverse in the sense of sexuality that has a much greater than usual amount of aggression in the mix.]

[One aspect of the "culture wars" that is problematic and routinely denigrated and dismissed by our enlightened elites, is the effect on the developing mind of the cultural sea change in sexual attitudes that were ushered in during the 1960s.  As sex not only became much more of a recreational pastime, with the widespread availability of contraception and abortion, the idea that all limits on sexual expression were somehow "bourgeois" and devalued became prominent.  "If it feels good, do it" was a mantra that has become increasingly incorporated into our cultural zeitgeist.  Sex for recreation without consequence has become accompanied by an explosion of sexuality and pornography in the culture.  Sex sells, it is a multibillion dollar business and the effect has been a simultaneous overstimulation of our young with a weakening of the societal prohibitions against what once were considered unacceptable sexual behaviors and practices.  In part this is a redress against the inhibitions of earlier times, but it also represents the freeing of the Id that the left has long championed.  The pendulum that swings between license and responsibility has gone quite far toward the licensing side of the ledger and the effects on society have been mixed, at best.  Many people are freer than ever to live their lives the way they prefer, but there has been an accompanying diminution of responsibility for the results of our prescription that "anything goes."]

Arab culture has taken a markedly different tack from the Judeo-Christian West.

The Arab Mind: Part XV

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

My work on the Arab Mind series has slowed recently.  The preparation time is significant and work and other demands on my time have made it difficult to post on any regular basis.  However, this week I received an e-mail that is germane to the topic and worth posting. 

Reader DE described his experiences with his American/Christian Egyptian wife and her family.  He was specifically concerned with the behavior of his wife's Father.  I am reproducing his e-mail with minimal editing:

I hope you will please respond to my email as you have a broader understanding of the cultural norms and child-rearing practices of the Arabic nations.  I am a Caucasian, educated (communication prof.) male who married a first generation American/Christian (Presbyterian) Egyptian woman in 1999.  Her parents emigrated to the U.S. in the late 60s/early 70s.  Amal (my wife) is their second born and second daughter.  The family tried to portray the perfect Christian as we were dating at a distance before marriage.  However, shorty before we were married and more-so after, I began to see that there was major dysfunction in the family and that my wife's "mild" mental health issues, were actually very severe.  I was able to deal with my wife's issues (OCD, anxiety, depression, eating disorder, personality disorder) until we had a girl child in 2005.  She could not care for the child and would frequently go into a rage when confronted with the problem.  I was able to gain control of the situation when Annika (our daughter) was 11 months old, getting Amal into the OCD program at Menninger Clinic in Houston TX.  After three months she was asked to leave the program for non-compliance and the head of the clinic Thrustor Borg Vinson recommended I separate or divorce and gain custody of my child.  I started the divorce process in Sept. 2006 but have not completed it, as I still love my wife and am hoping my she can find the power to begin to defeat her problems.  I did receive custody of Annika with Amal being allowed five four-hour visits every two weeks supervised by her mother and father (Gidu and Tata to my daughter).  Here is where my concern lies.

When I would drop Annika off and pick her up I began to note unusual behaviors in how her Grandfather interacted with her. 

The Arab Mind: Part XV

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

On the Use of Language: Hyperbole as Defense

Until 9/11 most Americans, and most Europeans, had almost no experience of the Arab use of language.  Arabic spokesmen were adept at using soothing, noninflammatory language when speaking to Westerners.  There were few people with access to the Media who actually spoke Arabic, and there was no MEMRI, Camera, or other translators available to most people to facilitate learning of the actual words used by the Arabs in their native language(s).  Since 9/11 and with the explosive growth of the Internet, it has become much easier to obtain translations of actual speeches meant for and delivered to Arabic speaking audiences, and this now allows for a greater understanding of how such language is used and what the words are meant to convey.

Raphael Patai remarked upon the beauty of the language, the belief among Arabs that Arabic is the most perfect of languages, the use of Arabic as a bond which cements the Umma as one, and the centrality of Arabic for Islam:

(pp. 49-50) Just as the Koran became the holy book of all Muslims, so Arabic became the holy language of all Muslims, including those of the peripheral belt who never adopted Arabic as their colloquial.  They read and recited the Koran by heart in Arabic, they prayed in Arabic, and they adopted the Arabic alphabet (with some variations) as the script for their own languages. ...

If such was the esteem in which Arabic came to be held in the peripheries, where only a very few scholars attained full mastery of it, in the core area Arabicized after the Muslim-Arab conquest the holy language of the Koran attained a position never approximated by any other language in any other culture. ... The best Arab minds considered the Arabic language the greatest treasure possessed by the Arabs and devoted enormous ingenuity to the fullest possible utilization of its potential.  In this they were greatly helped by the rich vocabulary of Arabic, the great variability of Arabic verb structure, the ease with which the language lent itself to rhythmic cadences, and its exceptional suitability to rhetoric and hyperbole.

As with any language, how ideas are expressed and what they convey contains multiple layers beyond the manifest content.  The tendency of Arabic speakers to use rhetoric, hyperbole, and the relation between words, tenses, and action are all important considerations when trying to understand the Arab Mind.

The Arab Mind: Part XIV

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Digression and Refinement

The more time I spend on this series, the more I recognize how inadequate the title is.  When I began the series, inspired by my reading of Raphael Patai's seminal book, The Arab Mind, I was content to use his definition of an Arab, ie someone who speaks Arabic and identifies himself as an Arab.  Patai spent a great deal of time traveling throughout the Middle East, primarily within Arab nations and Israel, and had little to say about Iran or Pakistan, two current examples of Muslim nations struggling with the implementation and interpretation of Islam and Sharia.   From the vantage point of 2008, however, it is clear that despite the very great differences between such nations as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan, and stateless Islamist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda, and all its off shoots of Sunni Islamism, there are certain fundamental similarities between the way the minds of the fundamentalists work.   Further, there are also similarities with secular authoritarian and totalitarian nations (Syria) and non-state actors (Fatah) which are shared with the fundamentalists.

This creates very difficult problems when trying to describe exactly who is culturally a part of what I have been calling The Arab Mind.

Perhaps it would be closer to say that what is being explored is the Muslim mind, yet this is clearly incorrect and inadequate as well.  According to Michael Totten, Kosovar Muslims have rather specifically rejected Saudi funded attempts to radicalize them and have lived peacefully as Muslims among their European brethren for a very long time.  Further, although there are continuing attempts being made to radicalize Indonesian Muslims, by and large Indonesia remains a moderate nation uninterested in conducting Jihad against their neighbors.

In an attempt to better address this conundrum, I would propose that what Raphael Patai has called The Arab Mind is a descriptive term for those people raised and nurtured in a particle cultural milieu in which the Koran and Sharia have been given primacy.  The stricter the cultural adherence to a fundamentalist reading of the Koran and Sharia, the more closely do the individuals resemble the distillation referred to as The Arab Mind. 

The Arab Mind: Part XIII

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

There was a lively discussion after the last post in this series which centered around the question of how relevant the Arab Mind is to understanding our present day conflict with the Arab and Muslim world.  As well, and not for the first time, I was taken to task for underestimating or ignoring the role of Islam in the formation of Arab culture. 

For the first part, I would suggest that beyond the ad hominem argument put forth in an effort to invalidate this series, Nina, the commenter took the position that since her experiences in an Islamic country (she did not specify which country) did not match what I was describing, the series could have no validity.  Perhaps she had not read the entire series, including several disclaimers, but I have tried to be clear that the Arab Mind represented a distillation of an "ideal" Arab/Muslim developmental line as epitomized by the Saudis.  It is no coincidence that the Shia Persians have adopted very similar practices in their efforts to prove their bona fides as the truest representatives of Allah's will and the true heirs of the caliphate.  There remains something profoundly idealized in the Muslim World (spreading out from the concentric circles around Mecca and Medina) that the most devout fundamentalist Muslims aspire to.  For the second part, I would simply counsel patience; I have not yet attempted to integrate the particular teachings of Wahhabi/Salafi Islam into the Arab Mind, but would suggest that the radical interpretation of Islam promulgated by the Saudis supports all of the most problematic aspects of the Arab Mind.

To the objection that I have not spent years living in the Arab world and therefore have limited sociological and anthropological data upon which to base this discussion, I can only respond that my lack of such intimate knowledge of the culture does not mean that I can not use other sources of data and interpret such data through the lens of Psychoanalysis.  Some of the data is systematic and anthropological, such as Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind and Philip Carl Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, and some more anecdotal and sociological, as in the recent New York Times's articles about adolescent and young adult "relationships" (more below); further, I have also had a fair amount of direct discussion with Arabs and Western expatriates living in Muslim countries.   Most of the data supports the contention that there are narrowly constrained approaches to child rearing and sexuality and that these approaches can be usefully applied to an understanding of the development of the typical Arab Mind.

As noted, the New York Times, as liberal and multicultural a publication as one is wont to find, published two highly revealing articles this past week which illuminate and reinforce some of the points already made in this series.

The Arab Mind: Part XII

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Adult Sexuality

Thus far, I have concerned myself primarily with Arab child rearing habits and tendencies and their effect on childhood development, especially in the realm of sexual development.  An additional point that I have not emphasized is the prevalence of child sexual abuse within the Arab world.  Such abuse, which I have alluded to, tends to powerfully reinforce the regressive tendencies already noted, and increase the sexual anxieties that fuel the regression.  In this segment of The Arab Mind, I rely on Raphael Patai's descriptions to offer a more complete picture of adult Arab sexuality.  As with all of these posts, various caveats are in order.  First of all, the Arab Mind is a distillation and therefore, a generalization.  Describing the Arab Mind requires using a somewhat poorly defined definition of "Arab," which can be thought of as involving concentric circles centered on the Saudi Peninsula and adhering more closely to the archetype the closer to the center one travels.  Finally, to a far greater degree than other aspects of The Arab Mind, sexual attitudes and behavior, especially toward children, are difficult to measure in the best of circumstances, and in cultures which are by their nature secretive (based on the Honor-Shame dynamic), we are usually left with poor data from which to draw our inferences.  All that being taken into account, there are still features of adult Arab sexuality that can be examined and usefully understood.

What follows are a few rather extensive excerpts from Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, with some comments interspersed, which will be followed by further discussion:

(pps. 147-149)  Enough has been said of the sexual mores instilled into Arab children and adolescents, and about the atmosphere which surrounds the realm of sex, to make us suspect that the typical Arab attitude toward sex must be ambivalent.  And this, indeed, is the case.  The constant reminders of the sinfulness of sex are at one and the same time constant reminders of its desirability.  The enculturation of both boys and girls consists of an incessant sequence of admonitions against sex, until awareness is instilled into them that no transgression they could commit would be a calamity of such magnitude for their entire family as one in the sexual area.  As they grow up, they find that almost all the social arrangements which circumscribe the life of their community are centered on the single issue of preventing the possibility of a sexual transgression.  All this cannot fail to create a definite image of themselves in the minds of both men and women, as well as a definitive image of the opposite sex.  The youths grow up believing that were it not for the segregation of the sexes and the capital punishment that would be meted out to him if caught in a sex offense, all the prohibitions hammered into him would be unable to inhibit him from having intercourse with the first woman he encounters.  And he comes to consider his own sex drive so strong that only the physical impossibility of making love to the women of his social circle (because of their segregation, supervision, etc.) prevents him from consummating his desire.  The image the youth has of girls and women complements this self-image.  Their sexual drive is equally strong, and should he but manage to corner one of them alone, she might put up a wild show of resistance at first, but once he as much as kissed her, her "eye would be broken" and she would readily become his.  In fact, as the popular view has it, a woman's lust is greater than that of a man.

The Arab Mind Meets the Singularity

[Due to time constraints, the next post in The Arab Mind will be delayed; this post is related but much more speculative and imagines how the Arab Mind will deal with the coming technological changes, which has been called the Singularity.]

In the first eleven posts in my series on The Arab Mind,  I have tried to describe some of the child rearing practices and cultural trends that contribute to the development of a personality style and culture that are particularly poorly adapted to tolerate and facilitate change.  Arab culture has been relatively static for a thousand years and the Arab world has reacted to the threat of change engendered by contact with the West and other non-Muslims, by attacking and forcing the offending peoples to submit to Islam.  This worked for the Arab world as long as change could be easily kept at a distance.  The modern world is making this traditional manner of cultural self-defense unworkable.

This post is a much more speculative discussion of the impact of our rapidly changing technology on Arab culture and the Arab mind, and especially the impact of some of the projected changes that are fairly close in historical terms, on the order of 10-25 years.

From time to time I have written about the evolving clash between Islam and the modern world, especially the accelerating rate of technological change leading to the Singularity, which will, in time, cause an implosion in the Islamic world.  I would like to add some detail to the scenario and explore why Islam as it is currently promulgated in its fundamentalist versions (whether Wahhabi/Salafi or Shia Khomeniist) cannot survive the clash.

Arab societies are all essentially Prime Divider societies:

These societies are based on the political axiom “rule or be ruled” and permit even require the use of violence to defend one’s honor. They contain following main features.

legal privilege for the elites (including exemption from taxation, lighter sentences for their misdeeds and heavier penalties for offenses against them).

The Arab Mind: Part XI

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Male Sexual Anxiety and the Danger of Female Sexuality

Male sexual anxiety is a universal part of male psychosexual development.  In the modern Western world, attempts to minimize the anxiety are often expressed through crude "locker room" humor, pornography, and other manner of objectifying women.  A women who is primarily an object for sexual gratification is much less threatening to an insecure man than a fully three dimensional woman who has her own desires and independent mind.  The idea that such a woman could find the man lacking in his sexual prowess and endowment is a great source of anxiety for many men who have difficulty negotiating the developmental milestones along the way toward adult relatedness.

In the Arab Mind, the culture has been much less developed in its handling of male sexual anxiety.  Female sexuality is so intensely frightening to the insecure Arab male that extreme measures have been devised to help control his anxiety. 

In my last installment of this series, The Arab Mind: Part X, I discussed the concept of the women's body as a container of 'ird, honor, which can only be diminished by her misconduct (including being the victim of sexual assault) and can never be replenished.  In order to protect against the woman's sexuality despoiling the honor of his family, the Arab man must find ways to constrain her freedom to transgress.  Thus, in Saudi Arabia, an unaccompanied female is considered to be de facto evidence of shameful behavior.  Worse, an unveiled woman, in many Arab communities, is considered a danger and a temptress.

Iran: Top Shia cleric says unveiled women turn men into beasts

Mashad, 10 April (AKI) - A top Shia cleric in Iran has said that unveiled women are a serious danger to Iranian society as they cause men to be "transformed into beasts".

"Women without the veil are a danger that the authorities underestimate," said Hojatolislam Seyyed Ahmad Elmalhoda, a powerful cleric who leads the Friday prayers in Mashad, a site considered sacred for Shia Muslims as it houses the shrine of Imam Reza.

"This situation is very serious in that if men see these bad women, they will turn into beasts, and then the whole of society will have to pay the consequences."

This is a rather straightforward depiction of the female as temptress that is ubiquitous in the Arab world.  However, there are additional factors that enhance male anxiety with female sexuality in the Arab Mind. 

The Arab Mind: Part X

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Shame and the Female Body

Child Psychoanalysts have long been familiar with the concept of the female body forming a container.  When children first learn that the Mother carries a baby within her womb, a potential space within her body, they create fantasies about what such a potential space, a container, contains when it is empty.  This representation of the female body as container is primordial and exists and persists within our unconscious minds.  In its most positive forms, it contributes to the womb envy that creates conflicts for many men who are involved in creative pursuits.  After all, the female of the species can be overtly generative and creative; the man can only create pale derivatives of an actual new life.

In the Arab Mind, woman as container takes on much greater significance.  This relates to the important distinction between sharaf, non-sexual honor, and 'ird, the specific kind of honor connected to the female body.  Yotam Feldner, writing in the December 2000 Middle East Quarterly, offers a succinct description:

Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

In contrast, ‘ird relates only to the honor of women and its value can only decrease. [Emphases mine-SW] It translates roughly as the Western concept of "chastity" or "purity." And as with chastity or purity, exemplary moral behavior cannot increase a woman's ‘ird but misconduct reduces it. In addition, ‘ird trumps sharaf: the honor of the Arab family or tribe, the respect accorded it, can be gravely damaged when one of its women's chastity is violated or when her reputation is tainted. Consequently, a violation of a woman's honor requires severe action, as Tarrad Fayiz, a Jordanian tribal leader, explains: "A woman is like an olive tree. When its branch catches woodworm, it has to be chopped off so that society stays clean and pure."

What behavior amounts to a violation of family honor is not precisely codified. Basically it involves an unsupervised contact of a female with a male that may be interpreted by society as intimate. Such contact can be trivial: a 15-year old Jordanian girl was stoned to death by her brother who spotted her "walking toward a house where young boys lived alone." As for rape, society perceives the violated woman not as a victim who needs protection but as someone who debased the family honor, and relatives will opt to undo the shame by taking her life. Failure to do so further dishonors the family.

The concept of 'ird involves an inherent quality with which a woman is born.  It must be preserved at all costs since it can only diminish and can never be replenished (notwithstanding the popularity of hymenoplasty in some Western Muslim populations.)

The Arab Mind: Part IX

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

Narcissism and Honor-Shame Dynamics

The intersection of the Arab child rearing practices that I have been describing and Arab culture is nowhere so clear as in the Honor-Shame dynamics which dominate Arab culture today.   Honor-Shame is nothing less than the summation of the pathological narcissism that Arab child rearing engenders. 

Whether discussing sexual play with boys, the instant gratification afforded pre-Oedipal boys, the mirror image deprivation afforded young girls, or the sudden change for the boy to a posture of submission enforced by physical abuse, the consistent underlying pathological feature is a disrupted empathic connection between the parent and child.  The young boy who is always gratified does not develop the necessary ability to tolerate reasonable frustration; at the same time he develops an exaggerated sense of self, a grandiose self.  The young girl who is deprived of gratification develops a deeply impaired and damaged self, what has been called in its extreme form "soul murder" and what in more attenuated forms can evidence as  poor self-esteem.   In the cases of extreme gratification and extreme deprivation, the parent responds to their own designs and needs as opposed to the Western ideal of responding to the child's infantile needs.  Such needs include a deft dosage of deprivation and a reasonable amount of gratification; at the extremes, narcissistic vulnerability is the result.

Deficits in parental empathy are instrumental in developing narcissistic pathology.  Dr. Sanity has described the developmental lines of Narcissism in her excellent series on Narcissism and Society.  She points out the need for the healthy character to integrate the parallel lines of grandiose self and the idealized parental image which originally emerge from the fused self/object symbiosis of the early Mother/infant dyad:

It is because of the slow separation of Self from Other that the two developmental lines come into being. The first line (Heinz) Kohut refers to as the “Grandiose Self”(or idealized self image) and the second is referred to as the “Idealized Parent Image”. Both of these images represent psychological attempts to save the original experience of "perfection" by the infant when the Mother (Other) and the infant (Self) were “one”.

The “Grandiose Self” will develop over time (if not disrupted) into healthy Self-Esteem; and the” Idealized Parent Image” will eventually lead to the development of Ideals that give meaning to the individual’s life; and to healthy interpersonal relationships.

The psychological developmental lines of Narcissism is a difficult concept; I urge you to read her series (Part I, Part II, Part III) as well as my series on Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV) to gain a better understanding of the concept.  For the purposes of this series, suffice to point out that Arab child rearing practices seem ideally suited to the development of Narcissistic pathology.  This has important implications for Arab culture and there are two especially significant features worth emphasizing.   However, one more aspect of Narcissism must be considered before expanding the discussion to include the Honor-Shame dynamic.