Introduction:
Everyday the incompatibility of the Western world view and the Arab (Islamist) world view becomes clearer. Read the newspapers, watch the talk shows and the news readers, survey the blogs, and you can only come away with the impression that we do not understand our enemies (and this doesn't even include all those who do not even realize we have enemies) and our enemies, though they manipulate us well at times, do not understand what makes us who we are.
Culture is the sum total of the character traits of the people who constitute that culture. Character evolves from an infantile neurological set of tendencies (what Stella Chess referred to as temperament) through a complex interaction with the primary caregivers, usually the Mother, later expanding to include the Father (especially important in the formation of the Superego), and finally shaped by interaction with the greater, existing culture. As a result, cultures typically evolve slowly. In the West, most notably in Europe, we can see how the culture that has been brought into their midst by Muslim immigrants has interfered with assimilation (not that the Europeans have made assimilation easy or appealing) and is increasingly asserting itself in muscular and often violent ways.
Over the last 40 years my appreciation of Arab culture and the Arab mind has evolved. After the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israel Wars, I believed that the Arabs were "just like us" and that through dialog of equals and some give and take, peace would come. My knowledge of Arab culture and character was gleaned primarily from Television news and newspaper; it did not occur to me for many years that the depictions of the Arab that was all I was privy to were superficial and distorted by blindness and deception. After 9/11, when understanding our enemies became much more of a pressing concern, I discovered that there was a dearth of open source material pertaining to such issues as Arab child rearing practices, values, sexual norms and proclivities, etc. Time limitations, including daily blogging and the exigencies of the real world of work and family, made a systematic exploration of the topic impossible. However, I believe I have gathered enough data to begin to make some inferences and offer some understanding. To that end, I am going to be presenting over the next few weeks, perhaps months, at irregular intervals, my interpretation of the Arab Mind. My primary source material, supplemented by various open source data and private communications I have found over the last several years, is The Arab Mind, by Raphael Patai; the book and author deserve some introduction.
Raphael Patai, 1910-1996, first published The Arab Mind in 1973, shortly before the October 1973 war, a war immediately and to this day hailed as a great victory by the Arabs. The book was re-issued in 1976 and 1983 (with new forwards by Patai), 2002, and finally, 2006, with a forward by Norvell B. DeAtkine, Colonel U.S. Army (Retired.) Colonel DeAtkine describes the book as invaluable: (page x)
I congratulate Hatherleigh Press on their reprinting of this much needed and incisive study of Arab culture. In particular, these congratulations are warranted given the avalanche of ill-informed or sometimes malicious aspersions cast upon this seminal work. Not only is it one of the finest books ever written on Arab culture, it is the only one in English that delves deeply into the culture, character, and personality of the Arab people.
From Wikipedia:
Raphael Patai (1910-1996) was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer and anthropologist whose life spanned most of the twentieth century. He was born Ervin Gyorgy Patai in Budapest, Hungary on November 22, 1910. His parents were Edith Ehrenfeld Patai and Jozsef Patai
His father Jozsef was a prominent literary figure, author of numerous Zionist and other writings, including a biography of Theodore Herzl. He was founder and editor of the Jewish political and cultural journal Mult es jovo, [Past and Future] (1911-1944), a journal that was revived in 1988 by Janos Kobanyai in Budapest. Jozsef Patai also wrote an early History of the Jews in Hungary, and founded a Zionist organization in Hungary that procured support for the settlement of Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine.
Raphael Patai studied at rabbinical seminaries in and at the University of Budapest and the University of Breslau, from which he received a doctorate in Semitic languages and Oriental history. He moved to Palestine in 1933 (his parents joined him there in 1939) and received the first doctorate awarded by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 1936. He returned briefly to Budapest where he completed his ordination at the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s Patai taught at the Technion and the Hebrew University. He founded the Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnology in 1944, serving as its director of research for four years. He married Naomi Tolkowsky, whose family had moved to Palestine in the early twentieth century; the two had two daughters, Jennifer (b. 1942) and Daphne (b. 1943)
In 1947 Patai went to New York with a fellowship from the Viking Fund for Anthropological Research; he also studied the Jews of Mexico. Patai settled in the United States of America, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1952. He held visiting professorships at a number of the country's most prestigious colleges, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Princeton University, and Ohio State University. He held full professorships of anthropology at Dropsie College from 1948 to 1957 and at Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1952 he was asked by the United Nations to direct a research project on Syria, Lebanon and Jordan for the Human Relations Area Files.
Patai's work was wide-ranging but focused primarily on the cultural development of the ancient Hebrews and Israelites, on Jewish history and culture, and on the anthropology of the Middle East, generally. He was the author of hundreds of scholarly articles and several dozen books, including three autobiographical volumes.
[See the Wikipedia entry for links and a full listing of Patai's publications.]
Reading the book is a bit like entering a time capsule. Patai writes with sophisticated and carefully observed naivety, (ie, without preconceptions) untainted by Politically Correct Multiculturalism. Patai had many close friends among the Arabs, especially in Palestine, and was privy to details of cultural proclivities that simply do not appear in modern scholarship about the Middle East and the Arabs who live there. At times, he uses language that shocks, primarily in contrast to the level of fastidiousness with which such topics are approached in our current climate of intimidation; such language today would be branded racist or Islamaphobic by the language police, and the ideas encapsulated in the language banned from public discussion. Yet his ability to reference source work in the original Arabic (among the several languages with which he was conversant) and his breadth of knowledge of his field of ethnography/anthropology make him a superb reporter.
Patai was quite aware that the "Arab Mind" is an abstraction, yet he also was quite clear in describing how he discerned those character traits which imprint most powerfully on Arab culture. I will finish today with two quotes from The Arab Mind, the first from Patai's Preface to the 1976 Edition:
... The Arab conflict proneness (pp. 232 ff.) has not diminished as a result of the October War and the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement pacts. On th contrary: these events have sharpened the conflict between the "moderate" Arab countries, led by Egypt, and the "radical" Arabs, headed by Syria, Libya, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Equally pronounced has been the conflict within Lebanon between the largely rightist Christian Arabs and the predominantly leftist Muslims; these two factions have been engaged in intermittent fighting which in the last two years claimed thousands of casualties and with which, at the time of this writing, the Lebanese government seems unable to cope. In other parts of the Arab world, too, internal as well as external conflicts flare up periodically, so that, all in all, except for Northern Ireland, the "Arab nation" comprises today the most strife-torn peoples of the world.
...
The Arabs' hatred of the West, on the other hand, which was virulent until 1973 (pp. 314 ff) has visibly abated since the Arabs have moved from the camp of the poor nations, to whom the West doles out charity, into the thin ranks of the rich, who can, and do, buy anything that strikes their fancy-real estate in the choicest locations of England, France, and the United States, factories, banks, works of art-and can, and do, hire the best Western experts to work for them. One does not hate those from whom one can buy what one wants and whom one can employ to do what one wishes.
One out of two will have to suffice.
Colonel DeAtkine, too, offers a mixed picture in his Foreword:
... the Arab intelligentsia continues to chase chimeras. Earlier it was Pan-Arabism, represented by Gamal Abdul Nasser who dragged his country into several disastrous wars. The it was Saddam Hussein who insisted he had defeated thirty-four nations of the Coalition in the first Gulf War, while his own nation crumbled around him. With the recession of Arabism has come political Islam offering cut and dried answers to all life's problems and, from Khomeini to Nasrallah, demanding public adulation of megalomaniacs who use Islam to build their castles of power. This too will inevitably lead to failure.
...
One point is certain. The West cannot change the Arab world; only the Arabs can do that; but there is nothing inherent or preordained that permanently consigns the Arab world to authoritarian government. All over the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Iraq, there are pockets of people risking their lives to confront the forces pulling the Arab world backward. As long as this is true, there is hope.
Only by understanding those forces which shape the Arab Mind and, in complex interactions, are shaped by and shape the greater culture, can we hope to find ways to help (or force) the Arab world come to terms with their myriad failures. Cultures change slowly because people change slowly, yet certain ideas can reach a critical mass and lead to rapid change, on the order of one or two generations. By tolerating, and effectively enabling, the worst aspects of Arab culture to be established in the West, we are doing a terrible disservice to the Arab cultures and to our own culture.
Part II to follow.
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