Sex, violence and "The Arab Mind"

As its title might suggest, Patai's book lacks intellectual rigor. Worse, it's a smear job masquerading under the merest veneer of civility. In fact, it's so sloppy and so biased that the best reason to read "The Arab Mind" today is for what it tells us about Westerners and what we want to hear about Arabs. In 1972 it was still possible to write as though psychology were something that applied to other folks; today it's fascinating to discover just what Patai fastened upon. What's interesting isn't so much that, in Hersh's words, Patai believed that "Arabs are especially vulnerable to sexual humiliation" as that Patai mirrors a long stream of highly sexualized or sex-obsessed Western views of Arabs. There is no straight line from "The Arab Mind" to Abu Ghraib, or to the war in Iraq, but there is a suggestive trail.

The Western preoccupation with the sexual aspects of Arab culture is so deeply ingrained that it remains unanalyzed: Think of "1,001 Nights" and "The Sheik" (which was an international bestseller before it became a vehicle for Rudolph Valentino), or the imagery of the harem and the veil. Of course the lowest-common-denominator Western imagery of Chinese, Japanese or sub-Saharan African cultures incorporates sexual stereotypes too, but the focus isn't as intense as in our view of Arab cultures.

Part of the problem may be that there aren't all that many Arabs living among us -- 3 and a half million, or hardly more than 1 percent of Americans, in the most generous estimates. But the other part is that the stereotypes have little to do with our actual experience with Arabs in the United States or during travel overseas. Even more than their cousins the Jews, who represent only 2 percent of the American population, Arabs are the stuff of myth.

The myth begins with sexual repression -- not ours, of course, but theirs. Only one-tenth of the pages of "The Arab Mind" discuss sex, but nearly all the discussion circles around the issue of repression. It begins in the cradle: Patai's diagrammatic Freudianism leads him to assign a prominent place to "Arab Child-Rearing Practices," the third chapter.

"Is there such a thing as a general pattern of child-rearing practices in the Arab world?" he begins, and answers that "even two such widely separated cultures as those of Morocco and Iraq appear quite similar when compared with the Greek, or Italian, or Sub-Saharan Negro culture."

Appear quite similar to whom? The French anthropologist Germaine Tillion, whose expertise is Berber culture, famously argued the opposite a decade before "The Arab Mind." She wrote that the key traits of what northern Europeans take to be Muslim or Arab society -- the seclusion of women, endogamy, male circumcision, the prohibition against eating pork -- are more usefully treated as fragments of an ancient Mediterranean culture underlying what are now Muslim, Christian and Jewish cultures. Tillion argued that child-rearing practices in southern Italy and France had until recently a tremendous amount in common with North African mores. Tillion's subtle, elegant and concise book, published in English as "The Republic of Cousins" (and recommended to me in Baghdad by the Iraqi-American intellectual Kanan Makiya), is, unfortunately, largely unknown outside France.

It certainly appears to be unknown to Patai. Having determined by fiat that his method is valid, Patai goes on to claim that because every noun in Arabic is either masculine or feminine, "there are no words for 'child,' 'baby,' 'infant,' 'toddler' and so on." Patai argues that because of this linguistic structure, there are no child-rearing practices in Arab culture, only boy-rearing or girl-rearing. Therefore Arabs imprint unusually sexist attitudes on their children from the day they are born.

Next Page: Do Arab mothers routinely comfort baby boys by fondling their penises?

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