ShrinkWrapped

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. 

The Arab Mind: Part VIII

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

Education

By the time an Arab youngster starts school he is already predisposed to defer to authority.  Taking the initiative, thinking "out of the box", and challenging convention are all forms of learning that are antithetical to the Arab Mind as developed over the first few years of life. Where Western children are subtly, and often overtly, exhorted to challenge authority, the Arab child has learned to be excessively deferential and obedient to (male) authority.  The lessons have been reinforced by beatings and other corporal punishments.  (See Part VI, especially.) 

It should come as no surprise that a similar authoritarian atmosphere is the norm in many Arab schools.  The most extreme examples of such pedagogy occurs in the fundamentalist madrasas but even in more liberal, Westernized schools, the use of rote memorization and unquestioned acceptance of proffered explanations, no matter how fantastical, are primary methods of instruction.  In a personal communication a young Arab man who was educated in a very liberal school in Kuwait (liberal by Kuwaiti standards) described the classroom situation which required students to memorize lessons, regurgitate rote descriptions, and concentrate most energetically on their study of the Koran.  In more traditional schools, this can take on trappings that are absurd to Western eyes.

For example, Elder linked to an article in Foreign Policy that described the education of a young Arab boy in a fundamentalist madrasa in Pakistan.  Pre-9/11, the writer described memorizing verses from the Koran in a language, Arabic, that he did not understand:

Today's madrasahs: "Young minds are not for thinking"

As a 9-year-old boy, I knelt on the bare floor of the neighborhood madrasa (religious school) in Karachi, Pakistan, repeating the Koranic verse, “Of all the communities raised among men you are the best, enjoining the good, forbidding the wrong, and believing in God.”

Hafiz Gul-Mohamed, the Koran teacher, made each of the 13 boys in our class memorize the verse in its original Arabic. Some of us also memorized the translation in our own language, Urdu. “This is the word of God that defines the Muslim umma [community of believers],” he told us repeatedly. “It tells Muslims their mission in life.” He himself bore the title hafiz (the memorizer) because he could recite all 114 chapters and 6,346 verses of the Koran.

Although the changes in education post-9/11 are significant, they are on a continuum:

The Arab Mind: Part VII

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

Male genital anxiety is ubiquitous.  Most men typically pass through stages in their childhood where they are overly and consciously anxious about their genitals.  Preoccupations with size and performance are common enough experiences as to offer an endless supply of late night comedic material.  The developmental history of genital anxiety, often referred to by its short hand, castration anxiety, is instructive.  At approximately age 4, the young boy enters the Oedipal phase of his development.  The psychological and developmental conflicts of the period have to do with (partially) surrendering his attachment to his first love, his mother, in preparation for entering the real world.  As the boy undergoes the physical changes that are part of his entry into the Oedipal Phase, his penis becomes the center of his emotional life.  Nascent and inchoate sexual sensations become centered on his penis and it is not uncommon for 4 and 5 year old boys to show off their physical prowess and their penis, both aspects of their body that bring great joy and excitement.   At the same time the knowledge that their mother, for all the love and affection she showers upon him, prefers to sleep with his father, introduces elements of jealousy and rivalry.  In Freud's famous construction, the boy finally gives up his mother to his father for fear of his father's wrath, embodied for the child in terror of being castrated for challenging his father.

Many have criticized various aspects of the Freudian understanding of the Oedipal conflict and its crucial role in castration anxiety, but few critics have questioned the role of genital anxiety in the resolution of the Oedipal phase and its centrality to male psychosexual development.  Events that intensify the already extant castration anxiety of the period are likely to have long lasting repercussions in the development of the boy.  For that reason, understanding the role and nature of circumcision in the Arab culture and for the Arab mind is of great importance.  An aspect of the Arab culture that is clearly related to genital anxiety pertains to the Arab fear of female sexuality.  In Part III of The Arab Mind, I described how the important women in the very young Arab boy's life would stimulate his penis to sooth him or merely to amuse themselves.  This has the effect of establishing from an early age that an Arab boy, to a much greater extent than in the West, has no control over his own sexual excitement.  His excitement arises from external sources out of his control.  Western men may joke about their excitement and lust being forced upon them by a beautiful woman but for Arab men it is much closer to a realistic depiction of their experience.

While it may seem counter-intiuitive, the practice of circumcision in the Arab world exascerbates this trend. 

The Arab Mind: Part VI

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

Posts II, III, and IV in this series have dealt with the differences between Arab child rearing of boys versus the treatment of girls.  The disparity is striking and has repercussions on the development of the sense of self and self worth that is a primary developmental aspect of early childhood.  There are two extremely important considerations that require incorporation in the explanation of character development of the Arab Mind.  The first, pervasive corporal punishment often merging into overt physical abuse and overt sexual abuse, I will address today and the second, the meaning, timing, and experience of circumcision, will be the topic of the next post in this series.

Corporal punishment, physical abuse, and sexual abuse of children are impossible to quantify in the Arab world but the culture and religion expressly permit and sanction behavior that in the West would be easily recognized as abuse and the extant evidence suggests the problem is pervasive and deep rooted.  Patai sets the scene: (pp. 35-36)

... about this time (the fourth year, more or less), the father begins to pay more attention to his son and the boy's gradual easing over from the women's to the men's world begins.  This paternal attention is, from the boy's point of view, a mixed blessing.  The father, much as he may love his son, is required by t he folk mores to develop the boy's character, and the methods of fatherly socialization are often harsh.  As long as he was under the exclusive tutelage of his mother, or a female mother-substitute such as an older sister, aunt, or grandmother, the boy could in general have his way. ... The men's world, as represented by the father is very different.  Here, the boy is suddenly confronted by standards.  While his own wishes are disregarded more often than not, he has to learn to fulfill his father's wishes, to obey his commands, to serve him and even to be subservient to him.

This change in status is not an easy one to get used to, and it takes a long time, years in fact, for the new role of a young (for a while the youngest) male child in the men's world to become internalized.  In the meantime clashes occur, and with them comes the bitter taste of the father's heavy hand, the rod, the strap, and, at least among the most tradition-bound Bedouin tribes, the saber and the dagger whose cut or stab is supposed, beyond punishing the disobedient son, to harden him for his future life. [Emphasis mine-SW]

...

The Arab Mind: A Necessary Digression

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

Who is an Arab?

I realize I have up until now omitted an important point for the purposes of this discussion.  In part I had finessed the topic because of its complexity but the question is important.

In response to the reasonable question, who is an Arab?  I would like to offer the functional definition that Raphael Patai settled upon for his study of "The Arab Mind." Patai spends several pages in his tome discussing various ways of thinking about and delineating the "Arab" and he concludes: (pp. 13-14)

Numerous scholars, both Arab and Western, have struggled to answer the question, Who is an Arab?  The answers usually include one or more of the following criteria: Arabs are those who speak Arabic, are brought up in Arab culture, live in an Arab country, believe in Muhammad's teachings, cherish the memory of the Arab Empire, are members of any of the Arab nations.  A moment's reflection will suffice to show that of all the criteria, only the linguistic one holds good for all Arabs and for almost nobody else but Arabs.  ...

... for want of a better definition, we go along with the one [definition] suggested by Jabra I. Jabra, a Baghdati critic, novelist, and poet, to the effect that an Arab is "anyone who speaks Arabic as his own language and consequently feels as an Arab."

In addition, Patai points out that Islam attributes legitimacy as highest among those who can trace their lineage back to the Prophet and his closest family and associates and the legitimacy diminishes as one moves outward in concentric circles from Mecca/Medina, to the larger Arab Middle East to the surrounding Muslim non-Arab lands and ultimately to the edges of Islam where it meets the Dar al Harb.

The Arab Mind: Part V

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

I have spent a fair amount of time already describing in some detail Arab child rearing characteristics that are formative for character development.  Before continuing with these ideas, I thought it useful and timely to consider the views of a noted Arab intellectual who inadvertently reinforces many of the implications of this series.

Turki Al-Hamad is a Saudi  author and intellectual described by MEMRI:

Turki Al-Hamad is a former political science professor who has been harassed and arrested several times by the Saudi police. He was included in Osama bin Laden's 2006 list of Arab "freethinkers" who should be killed.

According to MEMRI, Al-Hamad has grown increasingly pessimistic about (the) possibility of real change and explained why in an interview on al-Arabiya TV:

Turki Al-Hamad: "The taboos in Saudi Arabia are different from the taboos in Lebanon, and from the taboos in Egypt, and so on, even though I believe that in all these countries, they tend to view the taboo itself as fundamental. This was not the case in the past. I believe that we've reached the point where everything is ruled by prohibitions. Everything is prohibited unless it is proven to be permitted. This is the problem of Arab society and culture. Instead of making progress, we are regressing – and if only we were regressing in a reasonable manner. Unfortunately, we are regressing in a superstitious and unreasonable manner."

Interviewer: "So in your opinion, this nation is living in myths and superstitions, rather than living reality, as it should."

Turki Al-Hamad: "Absolutely. Today's world is ruled by logic. It operates according to a certain logic, which views the future according to certain criteria and considerations. We, on the other hand, have forsaken this future for the sake of myth. We live in the world of the supernatural, not in the real world, which we have completely neglected."

The question I hope to begin to answer in this series is what aspects of Arab culture support the regressive pull that Turki AL-Hamad describes.  Consider this description of the religious ideology that supports a backwards looking culture that idealizes death, not life: