Sex, violence and "The Arab Mind"

I still support the war in Iraq, but we need to rid ourselves of our perverse myths about Middle Eastern men and women.

By Ann Marlowe

Jun 8, 2004 | "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,' a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai ... The book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression ... The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.'"

-- Seymour M. Hersh, the New Yorker, May 24.

Poolside in Baghdad last June, I told some American journalists that I thought Iraqi men were pretty cute. They thought I was joking. The invective exploded: "Fat, sexist Arabs" was the party line. I was shocked, not least because these same reporters routinely criticized the American occupation for treating Iraqis poorly. And I was hurt, too. Many Iraqis looked like my own people. They looked like Jews. If Arabs are fat and sexist, what are they saying about Jews behind my back? Slurs against Arabs are, after all, just another form of anti-Semitism.

At the time, I worried that these casual bigotries showed an American inability to see Arabs as fully human. Perhaps this incident should have served as a wakeup call for me that my optimism about our ability to win Iraqi hearts and minds was misplaced. But as a supporter of the war I buried these doubts, and hoped for the best. Even if the journalists were giving vent to prejudices they would have been ashamed to voice about Jews, blacks or Asians, I thought better of the American soldiers I met.

I still support the war, and I still think most of the American military in Iraq did a remarkable job in seeing past such bigotries. But the abuses of Abu Ghraib make me think I should have taken the journalists' remarks more seriously. There is something about Westerners and the Arabs and sex, it isn't simple, and it needs discussion before it capsizes our relationship with the Arab countries. One good place to start is a bad book by an American Jew.

It is hard to take seriously a book titled "The Arab Mind," though apparently some influential people in our government did. The simple-mindedness of the title sticks in the throat, even knowing that author Raphael Patai, who died in 1996, also published a book called "The Jewish Mind" and even knowing that the pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism popular at the time he wrote might have influenced his decision to group all Arabs together. The Arabs Patai studied lived in Morocco, Lebanon, Iraq and Somalia. It is rather like writing "The North American Mind" and treating Mexico, the United States and Canada as part of one culture.

No matter that Patai earned two doctorates, and studied not only Arabic and Hebrew but also Aramaic, Syriac and Arabian inscriptions. No matter, even, that he professed an "incurable romanticism" about the Arabs and a "lifelong attachment to Araby." Only Patai's own history -- he was born in Hungary and educated in Budapest and Germany at the cusp of the Nazi era -- reassures us that he would have every reason to avoid racist stereotypes. Patai was among that generation of Jewish refugees who lived in Palestine (for 15 years in the 1930s and '40s) and then in the U.S., where he taught at Columbia, Princeton and -- his longest stint -- at Dropsie College, a Jewish institution later merged into the University of Pennsylvania.

Next Page: The Western preoccupation with Arab sexuality is so deeply ingrained it remains unanalyzed

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