Sex, violence and "The Arab Mind"

It apparently did not occur to Patai that while nearly every noun in French, Italian and Spanish is masculine or feminine, there are words for "child," "baby" and so on in those languages. As common sense would suggest, there are words for "child" and toddler" in Arabic too. In both modern standard Arabic and Iraqi dialect, at least, "tofl" means child and "radhee" toddler, regardless of gender. And of course Arabs speak of children and toddlers in general, just as other speakers of gendered languages do.

Did Patai make a basic mistake, hardly credible in someone who had taught Arabic at the high school level? Or was he perhaps trying to mislead the reader? A few pages on, Patai's discussion of the raising of little boys suggests biases so strong as to show bad faith.

"Comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals. Mother, grandmother, other female relatives and visitors, as well as his older siblings, will play with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but simply to make him smile ... The association of the mother, and hence women in general, with erotic pleasure is something that Arab male infants in general experience and that predisposes them to accept the stereotype of the woman as primarily a sexual object and a creature who cannot resist sexual temptation. The most frequently stated purpose of female circumcision is to 'calm down' the women, that is, to diminish their libido."

One wonders how Patai's avowed Arab friends reacted to this extraordinary piece of rhetoric. Patai's sources for the caressing of little boys' genitals are few; in the footnotes, he writes that an anthropologist "informed me that, according to one of his informants, this practice stopped in Lebanon after the child began talking and walking." One informant of one anthropologist is worthy of citation? The data is thin indeed. Common sense suggests that some mothers in all cultures fondle their children inappropriately, but most mothers in any given culture do not. Short of a massive study of Arab mothers, I'm not prepared to accept that they are systematically so different from Israeli or Italian or Spanish mothers.

Even if Patai is right about Arab mothers, his reasoning remains highly flawed: The upper-middle-class Viennese Jewish children observed by Freud also associated the mother with sexual pleasure. Apparently that is what breast-feeding children do.

So why do only Arab men grow up thinking of women as sexual objects? And how is this connected with the pre-Islamic North African practice of female circumcision? A culture can believe that women can't resist sexual temptation without circumcising them (for instance, traditional Afghan society). But a casual reader might come away from this paragraph with the impression that Arab mothers, by masturbating their infant sons, lay the groundwork for the circumcision of their daughters and the pathology of Arab society.

It will come as no surprise that the eighth of Patai's 16 chapters, "The Realm of Sex," emphasizes the repression of Arab societies compared with European culture. But it also abounds in elementary mistakes and misleading remarks. "Whenever a man and a woman meet, the devil is the third" may well be "a Sudanese Arab saying," as he writes, but it is also a variant of a celebrated hadith, or saying of the Prophet, reported by Tirmithi. This hadith is far more important than a regional folk saying; Patai should make more rather than less of it if he means to diagnose Arab pathologies. It underlies what Tillion has called "a sort of etiquette that obliges any boy to pay court to any woman he may find himself alone with"; she observes that in Mediterranean society -- not merely in its Islamic variants -- "we see sexual obsession imposed on men."

Patai is also on shaky ground discussing how Arabs talk about sex. He claims that "the very word for 'wife' (zawja) in Arabic is felt to be too indelicate to use, because of its sexual connotations (it is derived from the verb meaning to couple)." Yet my sedate Iraqi Arabic conversation book -- originally published in 1949 -- calmly uses "zawja" and the related adjectives "mitzawij" and "mitzawja" ("married"); the Quran also uses a variant of the word in distinguishing prohibited sex from sex within lawful marriage.

In fact, Patai's insistence on Arabic repression doesn't square with the Quran, which can be strikingly plainspoken about sex. In the important sura 24 aya 31, referenced by Muslims as one of the justifications for veiling women, the Quran urges "believing women" to keep secure their faroujejooneh, or genitalia, and in sura 3 aya 4 (often referenced because it permits Muslim men to take up to four wives) we are told fenkahou matab, "have intercourse according to your taste."

Next Page: According to Patai, the people who brought us algebra and astronomy are unable to calculate the passage of time

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