ShrinkWrapped

Its Their Nature II

In Its Their Nature I discussed how the character of a culture can fail when its elites adopt impossible standards for the societal ego ideal.  An example from the life of George Soros, a man who has devoted himself to increasing freedom but has evolved into believing that West Civilization, exemplified by Israel and the United States, is the greatest danger to freedom in the world today, sparked a fair amount of discussion.  It is clear that our character is being tested by the current times in fundamental ways.  What of our enemies?

The people who speak in the name of Sharia supporting Islam, whether radical Sunnis in al Qaeda or Hamas or radical Shia in Iran or Hezbollah, have summed up their Cultural Ego Ideal in a simple statement:

We love death more than you love life!

In the bizarro world of radical Islam, murdering one's enemies while killing oneself is reason for eternal glory and acclaim.  The highest aspiration of a Palestinian child is to be a Suicide murderer and the highest aspirations of his parents are attained when he blows himself up killing infidels, whether Americans, Brits, Israelis, Hindus, et al.  (Their list of enemies of Islam are very long and often include those who follow a version of Islam of which they disapprove.)

Sadly, most Americans remain woefully ignorant of the beliefs propagated throughout the Islamic world: (Report courtesy of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.)

THE OPEN RACISM OF THE FUTURE STATE OF PALESTINE

During a meeting with the Egyptian press in Cairo at the beginning of August, Mahmud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and the man on whom the United States and Europe have placed all of their hopes for peace, revealed what was at the back of his mind with regard to the Jews and the nature of the regime he plans to set up in the future State of Palestine. The official demands of the Palestinians for a settlement are known: Israel’s agreement in advance to withdraw to the borders of 1967, a freeze of construction in the territories including Jerusalem, the division of this city, including the Old City, which must become part of the Palestinian Authority, the solution of the problem of the “refugees” in conformance with Arab demands and Resolution 194 of the General Assembly of the U.N.).

When considering the possibility that a third force, such as NATO, could be given the responsibility of overseeing the implementation of the planned agreement, Mahmud Abbas imposed a condition: that there should not be a single Jewish soldier and any Israeli. “I am ready to accept a third party which supervises the implementation of the agreement, NATO forces for example, but I will not accept the presence of Jews in these forces or a [single] Israeli on the Land of Palestine.”

Anti-Semitism is the Mother's milk of Islamic radicals:

International Union of Muslim Scholars calls to destroy Israel

The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) has said the only solution for the Arab- Zionist conflict was “comprehensive resistance against the Zionist enemy with the aim of liberating all of the occupied Palestine,” local Arabic newspapers reported.

IUMS chairman Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, who opened the Union’s permanent headquarters in Doha, expressed gratitude to HH the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani for granting the facility.

The IUMS warned of sectarian and doctrinal conflicts among Muslims, which it said would serve “only the Zionist and American interests”.

The Union described Palestinian issue as the central problem of the Muslim Nation and as the most dangerous against its future, Rohama reported.

Here is the actual statement of the IUMS.

Qaradawi is possibly the most influential Sunni religious figure in the world.

Although anti-Semitism is the apotheosis of Islam's hatred, fear, and genocidal rage at the other, we cannot take comfort in the knowledge that so much of their discourse is directed at Jews.  Their hatred of Christians is only marginally less, as witnessed by the ethnic cleansing of Christian communities that go back over a thousand years in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian Territories, or the current straits in which the Egyptian Copts find themselves.

Islam's love of death is complicated by our fecklessness; since Islam is a "perfect" system, any problems with the world must be due to external forces arrayed against it.  There is no tradition of self reflection or self criticism in Islam and as a result there is an extremely limited potential for self correction:

Muslims Project Islam's Worst Traits onto Israel and the Jews

Sometime back, I noted that Muslims have been projecting the worst aspects of Islam(ism) onto the Copts, Egypt's Christian minority.  This raised more questions: Is Islamist projection onto the Copts a unique phenomenon? Do Muslims project against other non-Muslims? Is there a trend?

To answer this question, it seemed logical to begin with how Islamists approach their archenemy: Israel and the Jews.  Thinking this may be difficult to prove—it is one thing to hate your enemy per se, another to project unconsciously your worst traits onto them—I expected this might require some research.  I went to MEMRI and, lo and behold, in mere minutes, came across three blatant examples.  Consider the following excerpts, especially the italicized portions:

On September 7, Egyptian cleric Abdallah Samak made the following remarks on Al Rahma TV: "The Jews are known for their merciless, murderous, and bloodthirsty nature… The number one characteristic of the Jews – which appears in the Bible – is that they are always prepared for combat. They believe that it is their fate and destiny to be in a state of perpetual war. This is not what we want. We are seekers of peace and security. We seek to spread love. But we are dealing with a people, a society, that believes that its destiny is linked to war. The number one characteristic of the Jews is that they are a people that believes that its destiny is linked to war. They cannot live without war. They can only live if they attack others. They can only live through annihilation, revenge, and mercilessness."

In fact, the notion of "perpetual war" is straight out of Muslim doctrine and history—best recognized by the word "jihad"—and has no corollary in Judaism or any other religion.  Even temporary truces are permissible only when Muslims are weak and incapable of going on the offensive: according to sharia, once Muslims are strong enough and have proper leadership (e.g., a caliph), they are obligated to expand the realm of Islam through offensive jihad until, in the words of the Koran, "all religion belongs to Allah" (8:39). History unequivocally attests to this approach.  Moreover, while the Old Testament certainly contains many allusions to violence, these are of a historical, as opposed to doctrinal, nature. Conversely, Koranic verses dealing with violence have been codified in sharia and thus have a juridical and perpetual quality (note the word "until" in the most violent passages of the Koran, e.g., 9:5 and 9:29; see here for more on the differences between Judeo-Christian and Muslim violence). Finally, by quickly adding that Muslims "do not want" perpetual war, but instead seek "to spread love," Samak reveals that, immediately after evoking "perpetual war," Muslims naturally came to his mind, betraying a rather telling train of thought.

Raymond Ibrahim's article is well worth your time; read the whole thing. 

In my series on The Arab Mind I wrote at length about the elements that led to the kinds of skewed developmental pathways that summed easily to an Honor-Shame paradigm.  An Honor-Shame culture can take two different pathways.  In the Japanese approach, one accepts responsibility for faults and pays for one's transgressions against the people's Honor.  In Japan failure can lead to suicidal despair but does not threaten the entire Group (family/clan/religion/ethnic group) with a calamitous loss of Honor.  The Muslim Honor-Shame paradigm went in a different direction.  In the Muslim version no man of power ever accepts responsibility for failure; it must always be assigned to others, in part, because a loss of Honor by the Leader puts the entire family and clan at risk of destruction.  Once the failure is disavowed and projected (Externalized, or when done on a more pathological level, Projected) the resolution is to destroy the one who now bears the dishonor.  In this way a woman who has been raped is seen to have dishonored the family and must be killed to restore Honor.  In this system, Israel and the Jews, with the help of the Americans who they control, contain all of the disavowed hatred and dishonor of the Palestinians and thus a monster who murders children is a hero.

It took a hundred years and more, and a great deal of bloodshed, before the West understood the value of self reflection and self correction.  There is no indication that the Arab world will voluntarily take on such a difficult process, a process necessary for them to undergo if they are to join the modern world as anything more than spoilers.  When a people are committed to externalization and projection, only the force of inimical reality can redirect their attention inward.  In the Psychiatric Hospital we can administer powerful drugs which help the patients give up their compensatory delusions; there is no such treatment for sick cultures.  Either the Islamist trend in the Muslim world will burn itself out in the next two or three generations as Islamism confronts and fails in the modern world or one of two outcomes is likely.

1) As time goes on the Muslim world will be increasingly walled off and kept away form the civilized world.

2) A great enough atrocity (would it require losing a Western city or two?) would up the ante to such an extent that the Arab World would face an ultimatum that would force them to begin the difficult task of reformation.  Such an ultimatum could include mostly words but may also include demonstration projects less welcome, more intense, and of shorter duration than the current projects in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I suppose a third outcome is possible, but unlikely: we could simply surrender.

How Do Universities Breed Terrorists?

"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
— George Orwell

Jeffrey Goldberg links to an interesting piece today by Delia Lloyd:

Smart Bombers: Do Universities Breed Terrorists?

"What most people say is that people who turn to terror are the underclass, excluded, social detritus of the globalized economy," says Anthony Glees, a professor of political science and director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence at the University of Buckingham. "But a significant number of people convicted of terror offenses or killed in the commission of those offenses are university students or graduates."

In fact, the Centre for Social Cohesion -- a non-partisan think-tank that studies issues related to community cohesion in the U.K. -- puts that number at slightly over one-quarter for this country. According to a forthcoming report by the center, 26.2 percent of those involved in Islamist related terrorism convictions and attacks between 1999 and 2009 in the U.K. were educated at or above university-degree level. As Glees -- who identified extremist organizations on as many as 30 British university campuses in his 2005 book, "When Students Turn to Terror" -- put it, "Not every radical is a violent extremist. But every violent extremist has been a radical."

Interestingly, two sociologists who looked into the situation determined that Engineers are over-represented among terrorists:

More recently, however, two sociologists -- Diego Gambetta and Stefan Hertog -- discovered that what really matters isn't so much the level of education of would-be terrorists but what they study. According to their research, engineers are four times more likely to pursue violent extremism than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. In the West, at least, these scholars found that jihadist organizations actually attract fewer educated individuals, drawing more heavily from the working and middle classes. But there are proportionately even more engineers among their ranks than there are in similar organizations in the Middle East.

In his comments, Jeffrey asks a salient question:

Fighting Terror by Closing Engineering Schools

While they're at it, I'm wondering if Gambetta and Hertog can explain why so many Palestinian physicians (even pediatricians) take the leadership of terror organizations.

[He includes a rather chilling exchange from an interview he had with Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Pediatrician who became head of Hamas after the assassination of Ahmed Yassin.  Rantisi was later removed from the scene by an Israeli missile in April 17, 2004.  The leadership of Hamas during periods of active attacks against Israel is an insecure professional path.]

Although all such outcomes are over-determined, there are some fundamental reasons why Engineers and Physicians end up over-represented among ideologues who are so readily willing to murder those they see as their enemies.  In a post from 2007 I specifically considered the genesis of Doctors of Death:

Several trends intersect to produce Doctors of Death.  The intellectual underpinnings go back to the Nazis, whose ideology forms part of the ideology of the Islamists, adapted to their interpretation of Islam.  For certain types of Doctors who have an overabundance of intellect and an insufficiency of humanity, Physician training can be easily corrupted by ideology.

Physicians during their training must reconcile several seemingly contradictory impulses.  In order to cure illnesses it is almost always necessary to first inflict greater pain.  Early on, we learn that pain is a signal, it points to the source of the problem.  Patients who enter an emergency room in terrible distress ideally should not be treated with pain killers until the Physician has a very good idea what the underlying problem is; the alternative, treating the pain alone without an etiology, risks masking the illness and leading to disaster.  While pain medication should never be needlessly withheld, it is often necessary for the Doctor to allow for such pain in the service of the patient's greater well being.  Worse, many times manipulations and tests must be done that actually make the pain a great deal worse before a diagnosis can be found and definitive treatment established.  The only way for most Physicians to overcome their natural empathy is to objectify the patient in order to maintain an appropriate and helpful distance.  Only by turning the patient into an object, for example, can the surgeon allow himself to cut into a human being, causing immediate terrible damage and pain, with the ultimate aim of curing or ameliorating.  As our technology improves, the need for pain to direct treatment decreases, but pain will always be a part of Medical practice and, of necessity, so will objectification.

...

The Nazis took such objectification several steps further.  They skillfully created an ideology, based on identity politics, that considered the population as a whole as an organic entity, akin to a person.  The body politic was reified.  Once such a conceptualization had been made, the step toward seeing certain sub-populations as being akin to infectious agents or tumors, causing illness and distress in the body politic, became inevitable.  Medical Doctors then were tasked with curing the body politic by excising the offending sub-populations.  The gas chamber followed.

Islam as practiced by the purveyors of Wahhabism, goes yet another step.  Here the objectification of the sub-population is religiously sanctioned.  Islamic states overtly treat non-Muslims as sub-humans, with limited rights, whose very existence is a stain on Islam, though Islam gains stature by not only tolerating such lesser beings but actually hold themselves out as moral and peace loving by protecting the "inferior" races and religions ("Muslim man's burden", perhaps.)

The confluence of the Nazi inspired objectification of entire populations with its attendant genocidal rationalization with the Islamic religiously sanctioned genocidal rationalizations, creates a powerful toxic mixture which can easily overcome the rationality of a Muslim Physician.  Add in the tendency of the Muslim world to eschew any responsibility for their own suffering and the need to project all their hatred and failure onto others, and the Physician, in complete agreement with Mengele, Habash, Rantisi, and Zawahiri, takes it upon himself to "cure" his community by murdering the objectified other.  Murder and suicide then become evidence of his loving devotion to the well-being of his people and all the while he keeps himself unaware of the sadistic hate that fuels his "treatment."

The nature of engineering is such that there is a self selection of people who have less than the usual quota of "people skills."  The Engineer is then trained to understand problems in the most objective and objectified ways.  For someone steeped in the ideology of radical Islam (or raised in a religiously rigorous Islamic household)  it is a small step to perceive the problems of the Ummah as stemming from deformations of an ideal system caused by the presence of foreign objects, ie sand in the gears.  The necessity of removal of the offending dirt would naturally follow.

In the 14 Signs of Large group Regression discussed by the American Psychoanalytic Association panel at the 2005 winter meetings, number 3 on the list was:

3. Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.

Fundamentalist Islam specifically divides the world into the World of Islam and the World of War, members of the Ummah and infidels. 

Number 10 on the list was:

10. Dehumanization.  Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process.  Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects.  Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.

The combination of a Regressive religion which fosters splitting and dehumanization with specific intellectual pursuits which foster objectification of other human beings can, in unfortunate cases, create a toxic mixture which enables the emergence of the well educated terrorist murderer. 

Ideologues have always valued the masses more than the individual human beings who occasionally have to be purged for the "good of all."  Islam does it as well as any other ideology we have seen.

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.