144 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3

of empirical surveys; but, like earlier chapters, it draws on Freudian and a

few other psychoanalytic ideas to explain Arab self-image and culture.
At least for the lay person, it is important to know that Freud’s work
was discarded by his own disciples due to a lack of objectivity in his theory
and an overemphasis on sexuality and aggression. Freud personally suf-
fered from the Oedipus complex and Nazi aggression that shaped his the-
ory of human nature. Much of what he wrote was based on his interactions
with a handful of young and upper-class European women, and so does not
necessarily pertain to people of other cultures. Even for people in the West,
Freudian theory is outdated and has been revised over the years by neo-
Freudians and modern psychoanalysts.
Nehme, being a political scientist, seems to be unaware of this and has
taken liberties in overgeneralizing aspects of Arab politics to the entire Arab
population. However, if one agrees with his premise that fear and anxiety
exist in the Arab world, one also would have to agree with his suggestion
that such a topic should be brought to center stage and studied from an
interdisciplinary perspective. Hopefully, this will result in a more objective
assessment of the situation and a positive outcome for the Arab people. But
this may also be true of many other cultures and societies in the non-Arab
world, including the West.
A review of the notes and references suggests that besides Freud and a
few other psychoanalysts whose writings are based mostly on western
experiences, some references are from “scholars” who have a reputation for
distorting the Arab image. What is truly regrettable is that such a book,
which is intent upon slandering and promoting ethnic stereotypes, gets pub-
lished without a proper check for academic honesty and by a press that is
run with the taxpayers’ money.
Amber Haque
Department of Psychology, International Islamic University of Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The Arab Mind

Raphael Patai
Long Island City, New York: Hatherleigh Press, 2002.
rev. ed. 466 pages.

It is Raphael Patai’s ambition to chart the fundamental components of the

Arab worldview that most compels the reader to leaf through the 400 pages
 Book Reviews 145

of The Arab Mind. In one text, in less than 20 brief chapters, he seeks to
provide the elements that define the culture and mindset of the entire half-
billion-strong Arab world. For many readers, this enormous goal provokes
enough skepticism to prevent any hope for objectivity before reading a sin-
gle word. In this new printing, however, Norvell B. DeAtkine (director of
Middle East Studies, JFK Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, NC) pro-
vides a foreword that offers the highest praise for Patai’s work. For
instance, he acknowledges that this book provides the foundation for his
own instruction and coursework.
Hatherleigh Press, the publisher of this revised edition, is known for
its Body Sculpting Bible series, its Living With line of health books, and
its Flex series of athletic books. A more unlikely pairing reveals itself
when we discover that the original edition of The Arab Mind appeared in
1973, the same year as Clifford Geertz’s groundbreaking The
Interpretation of Cultures. Though Patai republished this book a decade
later, and this new, current edition appears less than a decade after his
death, it is clear that despite his familiarity with Geertz’s writings, he
chose not to embrace Geertz’s methods. Though none can deny the width
and depth of Patai’s insights, his own methods provide more problems
than solutions.
To define “the Arab,” Patai cites Gamal Abd al-Nasser’s three circles:
language, geography, and Islam. Although he dedicates nearly a tenth of his
book to analyzing the Arabic language, he states – to the reader’s shock –
that culturally, Islam is meaningless to the Arabs. Moreover, he manifests
this opinion by providing only one 13-page chapter on Islam’s role in the
Arab mind. The amount of effort that he spends on Islam here and in other
negligible references throughout the book is squandered by narrating a few
theological (kalam) arguments, occasional references to ethics, some men-
tion of language, and erroneous citations from Islamic law. Islamic history
is absent, save for a few citations to Prophet Muhammad and his generation.
The Umayyads and `Abbasids boast one reference each … in quotations
from other writings.
Furthermore, Patai states that Bedouins comprise less than 10 percent
of the Arab population, and then dedicates the largest sections of his book
to analyzing their psyche. His approach reveals more methodological prob-
lems. In his opinion, Bedouins are a foundation for Arab society, ethos, and
mythology. However, he does not distinguish between what is authentically
Bedouin and what is part of the myth that the Arabs may be imposing on
their memories of the Bedouins. If Bedouins, as Patai asserts, represent the
146 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:3

Arabs’ “heroic age” (as opposed to any of the Arab-Islamic empires that
dominated the region), then he needs to distinguish between romanticism
and reality. He does not.
Instead, Patai’s analysis mimics his analysis of every other aspect of the
Arab psyche. He relies on anecdotal evidence to support sweeping univer-
sals. Perhaps the most memorable (and humorous) anecdote involves a
series of conversations between President Nasser and King Hussein during
the Six Day War. Nasser repeatedly responds to Hussein’s inquiries with
lies, pretending that Egypt is dominating the Israelis, while the opposite is
happening. Patai uses this dialogue to show that Bedouins – and conse-
quently all Arabs – must always save face in their dealings. The reader may
consider it an odd choice to have a politician’s wartime statements repre-
sent the worldview of an entire population. The reader must also wonder if,
following the same logic, the rest of the world defines the American psy-
che as being based on any of the memorable Bushisms. Most of all, the
reader must wonder why Nasser’s deceitful statements represent all Arabs,
while Hussein’s inquiry (representing a search for information and truth)
does not.
In selecting this anecdote, I have perhaps used Patai’s own method to
refute his entire text. This anecdote reveals that Patai’s book is less of a
scholarly work in cultural anthropology and more of an ideological tract
driven by a particularly antagonistic agenda. I found myself wondering if his
paragraphs containing unnecessary information (like listing all of the letters
in the Arabic alphabet and then explaining how they are pronounced) were
anything but filler. I was puzzled by his repeated practice of twisting every
single trait in the Arab psyche into something manifested as a flaw. For
example, he notes the importance placed on self-respect, but then states that
Arabs lack self-respect, that an Arab must respond to any unfavorable com-
ments made against him with greater insults, and that Arabs somehow base
their own self-respect on their women’s chastity. In his section on language,
he cites the importance placed on language as something that forms a per-
sonality that partakes in making empty threats.
I have not discussed the largest sections of his book, his portrayal of the
savage intensity of Arab sexuality and his reductionist analysis of Arabic
stagnation, because the former is the most famous aspect of his text and the
latter contains little analysis and many quotations. What is most troubling
about this book, however, is not its contents or that he seems to disregard both
Geertz and Edward Said’s Orientalism (as illustrated in a childhood anecdote
about his meeting with Ignaz Goldziher), but, as DeAtkine mentions, that this
 Book Reviews 147

book is the Bible for military leaders and laypersons seeking to understand
Arabs. In our era of war, can the result be anything but trouble?
Omer M. Mozaffar
Ph.D. Candidate, Islamic Studies, University of Chicago
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Chicago, Illinois

Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence

Karim H. Karim
Montréal: Black Rose, 2003. 208 pages.

At the junction of history, international relations, political science, and

communication studies, Karim H. Karim’s Islamic Peril provides serious
and in-depth research on the media coverage of violence involving Muslim
individuals and groups. This updated edition of the book, first published in
2000, adds a preface and an afterword that briefly account for 9/11 and its
aftermath. While studying the construction of Islam as the primary “Other”
in Canada’s main print media since the beginning of the 1980s, the author
argues that the numerous (mis)representations and stereotypes of Muslims
are based on a lack of religious, sociological, political, and historical
knowledge rather than on what Karim calls a “centrally organized journal-
istic conspiracy against Islam” (p. 4).
The author concentrates on the construction, flow, and reproduction
of globally dominant interpretations through relations of power and dom-
ination between the North and the South, but also inside the North’s media.
His focus on journalism’s internal mechanisms (e.g., dependence on a
limited number of sources, the need for simplification, and the clash of
interests between information and business) and the wider sociopolitical
domination processes (e.g., the end of the cold war or unipolarity) pre-
vents the analysis from being overtly simplistic and adopting a victim
mentality. The author does not just highlight the (mis)representations; he
also tries to analyze them. His approach is optimistic, for it implies there
is no fatality in reproducing stigmatization and stereotypes.
Karim studies what could be called the “Islamization of representa-
tions”: the social construction of the linkage between facts of violence that
are historically and sociologically rooted and the notion of Islam as an
essence. His analysis does not revolutionise the approach toward discourses
on Islam, for one can feel how much he was influenced by the founding