Observations on Arabs (Part One) - Ayn Rand Admirers at The Atlasphere

Arabs, it turns out, can be very dissimilar to Americans. Understanding these differences — from how they think to how they view obligations — is important to understanding why our cultures often clash.

Journalist Jill Carroll is back home now, and detailing her experiences as a captive of the jihadists in Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor.

I’m sure the details will prove fascinating, but the upshot of what she has learned is that the Islamists are — gasp — different from us! Furthermore, I believe that she’s beginning to suspect that they are really not very nice people.

Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I’ve experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake — that of supposing that these people are bascially Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless, as Jill Carroll apparently was as well.

I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I “made my year” as expats there put it. That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of “running” from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say “he did a runner” to explain why someone isn’t showing up for work anymore.

And while my experience wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as Jill Carroll's, I could have told her a thing or two before she went to Iraq armed with her overflowing good will.

I went to the Kingdom with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances and a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from “blowback” from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel.

I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with us.

So, with the caveat that one of the first things I learned was that the term “Arab” covers a lot of territory, here are some observations and some tentative conclusions about Arabs, particularly Arabs from the oil states, about why we have misunderstood each other to the point that we are fighting a war with some of them and angering the rest of them. I suspect that many of these also apply to Iranian Islamists, but I have never been there and note that Iranians are not Arabs and have a different cultural history.

No, I mean THEY REALLY DON’T THINK THE SAME WAY WE DO. Yes, yes, I know we are all human and share the same human nature (perhaps the most disastrous mistake of Marxism was the denial of this elementary fact). But within the scope of that shared human nature, there are a lot of different ways to be human.

We Americans have a basically open attitude to our fellow human beings and sometimes forget this. Combined with the fact that most Americans are linguistic idiots, we tend to assume that anyone who learns to speak English learns to think like us.

2) When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.

Arabs are often easy to like, but difficult to respect — as opposed to Israelis, who are often difficult to like but impossible not to respect. From their nomadic heritage they have a tradition of generosity and hospitality to guests that warms the heart.

Arab shopkeepers have a talent for making you feel guilty that you didn’t buy anything (once you get past a dislike of having them lay hands on you). Haggling is a social grace with them and when you ask the price, and agree to the first one quoted, they will often come down on the price just out of pity for your social ineptness.

This does not in the least affect the fact that no friendship with you is ever going to remotely equal the obligations they have for their family, tribe, or the community of the Believers.

3) Their values are fundamentally different from ours; their self-esteem is derived from a different source.

And you know what? Theirs is PHONY. Yes I know, I’m making a cultural value judgment, the cardinal sin when I was a grad student in Anthropology. With us, the most important sources of self-esteem are useful work and the love of a good woman. We value being good at something that requires skill (even a hobby) and being of primary importance to somebody just because you are who you are.

Work for them is something to be avoided. The basic forms of work: making stuff, growing stuff, and moving stuff around, is taken care of by a class of indentured servants, usually non-Arab Muslims from the Third World, and, even today, by outright slaves. The Kingdom is a modern country that abolished slavery in 1967, but old expats have reported seeing slave auctions as late as 1981.

On one occasion a student of mine asked me, “Teacher, what do you call a man who can be sold?” (Excellent use of the passive voice, I was proud of him.) I explained, “He is called a slave, the condition is called slavery, the verb is to enslave.”

Later I had occasion to ask them about the headsman, the fellow who cuts heads and hands off in the chop-chop square in front of the mosque on Fridays. The reason I asked was that from my studies I knew that in tribal societies converting from a tribal or feudal system into a system of common laws, a man condemned to death by a court of law must often be executed by a member of his own tribe or a complete outsider so that the execution does not spark a blood feud.

In the Kingdom, the headsman is usually a Sudanese. My students explained, “Yes teacher, he’s a slave.” i.e. he’s a person of no importance and therefore outside the web of obligations of vengeance.

The point being, in a slave society, work is not honorable (as De Tocqueville pointed out) and cannot be a source of self-worth.

“Of conjugal love they know nothing.” (Thomas Jefferson on the French aristocracy.) In a land of arranged marriages, where the whole society is geared towards a strict segregation of the sexes and women are at least semi-chattels, romantic love is rare — and greatly desired.

In the Kingdom I found a few students with a consuming interest in romantic poetry, whom I had to teach very discretely. Most of them were just obsessed with sex, however. And interestingly, when visiting the West or the fleshpots of Bahrain, they are said to have a tendency to fall in love with the prostitutes they patronize.

Without honorable work, romantic love, or any accomplishments not overshadowed by those the West, their sense of self-worth comes from being the possessors of the One True Religion. And Allah doesn’t seem to be delivering on his promises of being exalted above the unbelievers these days.

On the plus side, they are willing to spare you and absorb you into their community as a respected member if you convert to the One True Religion. The Brotherhood of Believers is a reality in the lands of Islam, and while it sometimes falls short of the ideal (as does our democratic ideal) it is a reality, and in its way admirable.

With us, contractual and moral obligations tend to be equal and reciprocal. They don’t see it that way. The obligations of the superior to the inferior do not equal those of the inferior to the superior. Obligations within a family or clan outweigh all others.

That is why we had to take care not to sit members of the same clan near each other during exams. If one asks another for help, he has to give it, in spite of promises to the school, even when the clansman is a total stranger.

Obligations to other believers outweigh all obligations to unbelievers and especially when the believers are fellow-Arabs. And in contracts with unbelievers, the obligations of the Believer to the kaffir are not equal to the obligations of the kaffir to the Believer.

Consider that Muslims in England have quite un-self-consciously demanded that a pub near a mosque be shut down as offensive to their religion — in spite of the fact that the pub had precedence by six hundred years! Or that they demand the right to broadcast the prayer call on loudspeakers in London while it is illegal to have a church at all in the Kingdom.

5) Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can’t maintain it either.

The very concept of “maintenance” is foreign to them. This is what drives the foreign instructors in the Gulf absolutely mad. The per-capita richest countries in the world resemble Eastern Europe or Latin America in the tackiness and run-down appearance of the buildings and streets.

An electronics technician new to the Kingdom once told me how his first job was to inspect a junction box in the desert. He had to pry it open with a crowbar as it had evidently not been opened since it had been installed several years earlier.

This is expressed in the inshallah philosophy, “If God wills it.” A Palestinian friend of mine explained to me that even the weather forecaster will qualify his prediction, “It will rain tomorrow. Inshallah.” Or, “I will meet you tomorrow, inshallah.” (But God understands that I am a very unreliable person.)

I remember giving a pep talk to my students before a crucial exam, “You are all going to pass the exam, right?” “Inshallah teacher.” “No, no!” I shouted, “No inshallah. Study!”

In the next column, we will explore the major differences in values, from notions of truth to notions of war, that are ultimately responsible for today's culture clash.

Stephen Browne is a writer, editor, and teacher of English as a Second Language and martial arts. He has been living and working in Eastern Europe since 1991, though currently he is at the University of Oklahoma pursuing advanced course work in journalism. He is the founder of the Liberty English Camp, held annually in Lithuania, which brings students from all over Eastern Europe for intensive English study using texts important to the history of political liberty and free markets. He also keeps an up-to-date blog.