The Arab Mind

Last updated

The Arab Mind is a non-fiction cultural psychology book by Hungarian-born, Jewish cultural anthropologist and Orientalist Raphael Patai. He also wrote The Jewish Mind . The book advocates a tribal-group-survival explanation for the driving factors behind Arab culture. It was first published in 1973, and later revised in 1983. A 2007 reprint was further "updated with new demographic information about the Arab world". [1]

Contents

Contents

In describing his interest in his subject, Patai writes in the original preface to his book: "When it comes to the Arabs, I must admit to an incurable romanticism; nay more than that: to having had a life-long attachment to Araby."

Along with prefaces, a conclusion, and a postscript, the book contains 16 chapters, including on Arab child-rearing practices, three chapters on Bedouin influences and values, Arab language, Arab art, sexual honor/repression, freedom/hospitality/outlets, Islam's impact, unity and conflict and conflict resolution, and Westernization. A four-page comparison to Spanish America is made in Appendix II. The Foreword is by Norvell B. DeAtkine, Director of Middle East Studies at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg.

Public reception

The book came to public attention in 2004, after investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, writing for The New Yorker , reported that an academic told him the book was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." Hersh reported: "The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind.” [2]

Not only was the book a point of discussion among politicians and policy-makers, but it was actively distributed by the Pentagon to the U.S. Armed Forces as a purported pedagogical tool during the U.S. War on Terror. [3]

Criticism

Patai is criticized at several points in Edward Said's book Orientalism; he writes that the book functions:

“...to eradicate the plurality of differences among the Arabs (whoever they may be in fact) in the interest of one difference, that one setting Arabs off from everyone else.” [4]

Other scholars describe the book as simplistic, reductionist, stereotyping, generic, racist, essentialist, outdated, superseded, flawed, unscientific, coldhearted, and even intellectually dishonest. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] The book has been compared to Fouad Ajami's The Arab Predicament (1992) and Hilal Khashan's Arabs at the Crossroads (2000). [13] It is worth noting that some other scholars, including Arab scholars such as Mohammad Al-Jabri, used the concept of "Arab mind" or "Arab reason" to different effect. [15] [16]


Scholar Fouad M. Moughrabi observed that this book is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a wider pseudo-intellectual trend, writing:

"A substantial number of social-psychological studies dealing with the Arab world purport to explain the 'Arab basic personality', or 'the Arab mind'...Furthermore, the core of this research is often relied upon by many in the media and in the professions to explain everything ranging from internal political rivalries in the Arab world to the Arab-Israeli conflict...The use of terms such as the 'Arab mind' or the 'Arab basic personality', unscientific and demeaning to the subject of research, reveals a dangerous and misleading tendency toward categorical and sweeping generalizations which are not conducive to an enlightened search for better understanding of collective behavior." [7]

The Racism Watch organisation reported in June 2004 that Manning Marable, Columbia University director of African American Studies, had called for immediate action to be taken to end the U.S. military's use of the book. This was followed by a surge of media interest in the book during the summer of 2004. [17]

The book was described by The Guardian correspondent Brian Whitaker as one that presents "an overwhelmingly negative picture of the Arabs." [18] According to a 2004 Boston Globe article by Emram Qureshi, the book's methodology is "emblematic of a bygone era of scholarship focused on the notion of a 'national character,' or personality archetype". [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

When speaking of the music of Syria, it is important to remember that there are certain musical traditions and practices that have been present in Syria longer than others. There have been musical influences introduced into Syria through multiple eras of conquest and influences from surrounding cultures in modern-day Syria. Lying near Egypt and Israel, and connected to southern Europe by the Mediterranean, Syria became host to many distinct cultural musics through trade and route. The music present in Syria is related greatly to poetry, influenced greatly by the Bedouin nomadic tribes, the maqam system in Arabic classical music, as well as influenced greatly by the geopolitical movement and conflict in the Middle East. Syrian music generally has a singer who is accompanied by three or four instruments. The texture is usually thin but can become denser depending on the use of each instrument. Music is tightly linked to poetry in Syria.

Hassan Hanafi was a professor and chaired the philosophy department at Cairo University. He was a leading authority on modern Islam.

Fouad Ajami University professor and author

Fouad A. Ajami was a MacArthur Fellowship winning, Lebanese-born American university professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Efraim Karsh Israeli-British historian

Efraim Karsh is an Israeli–British historian, the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he serves as professor of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

<i>The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam</i>

The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam is a book, first published in 1967, written by Middle-East historian Bernard Lewis, and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. An updated edition was published by Oxford University Press in 1987, and another in 2002 by Basic Books.

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author who specializes in medieval millennial thinking. Until 2015 he taught at Boston University, and then began working at Bar-Ilan University, where his current interests include defending the politics of Israel in the light of what he calls media manipulation by Palestinians.

Raphael Patai, born Ervin György Patai, was a Hungarian-Jewish ethnographer, historian, Orientalist and anthropologist.

The Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1971. It is published by Taylor and Francis on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies, having previously been published by the University of California Press. The editors-in-chief are Rashid Khalidi and Sherene Seikaly. The journal covers Palestinian affairs and the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) is an English-language academic journal devoted to Arabist studies. It was established in 1979 by the late Professors Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. They envisioned the journal to be a platform for academic research to counter anti-Arab propaganda veiled by academic jargon. Since its inception, ASQ has been a refereed academic journal that publishes articles on the Arabs, their history and social and political institutions.

Cousin marriage, or "consanguinity", is allowed and often encouraged throughout the Middle East, and in other Muslim countries worldwide such as Afghanistan. As of 2003, an average of 45% of married couples were related in the Arab world. While consanguinity is not unique to the Arab or Islamic world, Arab countries have had "some of the highest rates of consanguineous marriages in the world". The bint 'amm marriage, or marriage with one's father's brother's daughter is especially common, especially in tribal and traditional Muslim communities, where men and women seldom meet potential spouses outside the extended family. Anthropologists have debated the significance of the practice; some view it as the defining feature of the Middle Eastern kinship system while others note that overall rates of cousin marriage have varied sharply between different Middle Eastern communities. In pre-modern times rates of cousin marriage were seldom recorded. In recent times, geneticists have warned that the tradition of cousin marriage over centuries has led to recessive genetic disorders.

Riad Ahmed Riad Mohamed Riad an Egyptian scholar and geographer. Among his books is “Journey in the time of Nubia", His original family name is Qassem Urfally.

Muḥammad ibn ʾIbrāhīm ibn ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad ibn Abd al-Wahhāb Al Shaykh Al-Tamīmī (1890–1969), was a Saudi Arabian religious scholar who was the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia from 1953 to his death in 1969. He is recognised as being amongst the forefront of Salafi theologians in history.

Mohammed Abed Al Jabri was one of the most known Moroccan and Arab philosophers; he taught philosophy, Arab philosophy, and Islamic thought in Mohammed V University in Rabat from the late 1960s until his retirement. He is considered one of the major philosophers and intellectual figures in the modern and contemporary Arab world. He is known for his academic project "Critique of Arab Reason", published in four volumes between the 1980s and 2000s. He published several influential books on the Arab philosophical tradition.

Motoko Katakura was a Japanese anthropologist who specialized in the Islamic world.

The Soviet Union used its relationship with Europe to gain economic cooperation with the Arab world during the Cold War and its influence in the Middle East by inciting proxy conflicts between the Arab states and their Jewish neighbors. The superpowers interacted with proxy combatants, which factored into the Soviet Union's omission from the Camp David Accords. The policy exposed Soviet dualism; while aiming to reduce their military budget and improve their image of the world stage, they pursued an anti-Israel policy in the Arabian Peninsula.

Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder is an Israeli-Arab sociologist, anthropologist, and feminist activist with a specialty in gender studies. She is the first Bedouin woman in Israel to receive a doctorate, and to be promoted to Associate Professor. In June 2021, she was appointed Vice-President for Diversity and Inclusion at Ben-Gurion University

Alan Mikhail is an American historian who is a professor of history at Yale University. His work centers on the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Maya Shatzmiller is a historian whose scholarship focusses on the economic history of the Muslim world. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003. She received her PhD from the University of Provence in 1973, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1992. Shatzmiller is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.

Petrofiction or oil fiction, is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society.

Neda Maghbouleh is an American-born Canadian sociologist, scholar, writer, author, and educator. She is the Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race, and Identity and associate professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

References

  1. ↑
    1. Recovery Resources Press, ISBN   978-0-9672015-5-9.
  2. ↑ "The Gray Zone" by Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker.
  3. ↑ Moughrabi, Fouad (2009). "MOVING TOWARD A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY IN THE ARAB WORLD". Arab Studies Quarterly. 31 (4): 17–31. ISSN   0271-3519.
  4. ↑ W., Said, Edward (2019). Orientalism. Penguin Books. ISBN   0-14-118742-5. OCLC   1200830761.
  5. ↑ Labelle, Maurice Jr (2019-04-01). "Empathy and the Lebanese Civil War of 1958 in the USA". Arab Studies Quarterly. doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.41.2.0172. ISSN   0271-3519.
  6. ↑ S. M. Stern (ed.), Ignác Goldziher, Muslim Studies, Transaction 2006, ISBN   0-202-30778-6 p. LXXXVI;
    Abdeslam M. Maghraoui: Liberalism Without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936, Duke University Press 2006, ISBN   0-8223-3838-6, p. 11;
    Michael Hudson: The Political Culture Approach to Arab Democratization. In: Rex Brynen, Baghat Korany, Paul Noble (eds.), Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, Lynne Rienner 1995, ISBN   1-55587-579-3, p. 66;
    Fouad M. Moughrabi, The Arab Basic Personality: A Critical Survey of the Literature. In: International Journal of Middle East Studies, 9.1 (January 1978), Cambridge University Press, pp. 99–112;
    Ibrahim Abhukattala, The New Bogeyman Under the Bed: Image Formation of Islam in the Western School Curriculum and Media. In: Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg (eds.), The Miseducation of the West: How Schools and the Media Distort Our Understanding of the Islamic World, Praeger 2004, ISBN   0-275-98160-6, p. 167.
  7. 1 2 Moughrabi, Fouad M. (1978). "The Arab Basic Personality: A Critical Survey of the Literature". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 9 (1): 99–112. ISSN   0020-7438.
  8. ↑ Davis, Eric (2008). "Pensée 3: A Sectarian Middle East?". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 40 (4): 555–558. ISSN   0020-7438.
  9. ↑ Zayani, Mohamed (2008). "COURTING AND CONTAINING THE ARAB STREET: ARAB PUBLIC OPINION, THE MIDDLE EAST AND U.S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY". Arab Studies Quarterly. 30 (2): 48. ISSN   0271-3519.
  10. ↑ فندي, ﻣﺄمون (1996). "«حتى لا نقع في الفخ܃ حدوتة «العقل العربي". The Arab Studies Journal. 4 (1): 17–21. ISSN   1083-4753.
  11. ↑ Turki, Fawaz (1975). "The Palestinian Estranged". Journal of Palestine Studies. 5 (1/2): 82–96. doi:10.2307/2535684. ISSN   0377-919X.
  12. ↑ Aruri, Naseer H. (1989). "The Recolonization of the Arab World". Arab Studies Quarterly. 11 (2/3): 273–286. ISSN   0271-3519.
  13. 1 2 AbuKhalil, As'ad (2001). "Recent Books: Arabs at the Crossroads". Journal of Palestine Studies. 30 (2): 115. doi:10.1525/jps.2001.30.2.108. ISSN   0377-919X.
  14. ↑ Strindberg, Anders; Wärn, Mats (2005). "Realities of Resistance: Hizballah, the Palestinian Rejectionists, and al-Qa'ida Compared". Journal of Palestine Studies. 34 (3): 23–41. doi:10.1525/jps.2005.34.3.23. ISSN   0377-919X.
  15. ↑ "Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri. The Formation of Arab Reason: Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, in association with The Centre for Arab Unity Studies, 2011. x+462 pages. Cloth US$90.00 ISBN 978-1-84885-061-3". Review of Middle East Studies. 46 (2): 234–236. 2012. doi:10.1017/S2151348100003451. ISSN   2151-3481.
  16. ↑ Esposito, John L., ed. (2003-01-01). "Jabiri, Muhammad Abid al-". The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195125580.001.0001. ISBN   978-0-19-512558-0.
  17. ↑ PCDC Edu - 2004 Racism Watch Calls for Action to End Use of Anti-Arab Books by the U.S. Government Archived 2010-08-30 at the Wayback Machine
  18. ↑ "Its best use is as a doorstop" by Brian Whitaker, The Guardian .
  19. ↑ Emram Qureshi (May 30, 2004). "Misreading 'The Arab Mind'". Boston Globe. Archived from the original on February 23, 2006.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.