ARABIA DECEPTA: A PEOPLE SELF-DELUDED

THE West is baffled by this people. Most Arabs from Aden to Algeria are poor, sick, uneducated, and desperately in need of survival training for the 20th century. The vision of a once great civilization moving into the modern world should be a cause to fire the Arab mind and spirit, a unifying challenge to build national pride and progress. Yet for two decades, Arab leaders have been more interested in mounting suicidal wars against Israel. If the Arabs truly weighed their own self-interest after their latest, disastrous defeat, they would face facts--or so a Westerner would reason--accept Israel's extended hand, and join in desert-blooming projects that could lift the whole Middle East to unprecedented heights of peace and prosperity. To begin this process, they would not need suddenly to embrace the Israelis, or grovel to them; they would need only to acknowledge the country's right to exist. But most Arab leaders utterly reject this idea. Even seemingly rational and well-informed Arabs cry that perpetual war against the enemy has only just begun and sincerely argue that "justice" requires the end of Israel as a state.

The world's 110 million Arabs have shown time and again a total inability to swallow their pride--and a total ability to swallow their own hyperbole. The worse their humiliation, the more unbending they seem to become. A refusal to accept unpalatable reality can be a very human trait on which the Arabs have no monopoly; yet the Arabs carry it to dazzling extremes. What ails them? Can they overcome their condition and function successfully in today's world? Or are they really a case of arrested development, doomed for generations to the kind of emotional and political instability that makes the Middle East one of the world's danger zones?

No Credibility Gap

The Arabs are suffering from one of history's worst inferiority complexes, caused by the shock of discovering that a glorious past has become irrelevant in a powerless present. The original Arabs were the Semitic tribesmen of the Arabian Peninsula, the passionate nomads and born makers of creeds, whom T. E. Lawrence called "people of primary colors." Today one can hardly define an Arab; the name spans a racial rainbow. "Arabs" may be squat Lebanese, tall Saudis, white Syrians or grape-black Sudanese. They include dollar-dizzy Kuwaiti, secretive Druzes, Gallicized Algerians and Christian Copts. Only about 10% are nomads, while most live in villages and cities (some very big: Baghdad, 2,200,000; Cairo, 4,200,000). Egypt is the Arab "capital," which fielded the largest army against Israel. But Egyptians were not originally Arabs, although they are now so considered. They come of Hamitic stock, a submissive people widely weakened by disease and the Nile climate, who have rarely in history won a war. The Saudis, among the purest Arabs, are also among the best fighters, but did not really fight Israel. Arabs fight bravely enough on their own soil--as the Algerians did against the French or the Jordanians in Palestine. Yet, despite all the anti-Israeli passion, few other Arabs are really eager to risk their lives for the Arabs in Palestine. The "Arab nation," which is so often talked about by the leaders, is nothing but "an act of will," says British Arabist Sir Hamilton Gibb. It does not correspond to any visible political entity. Pan Arabism is at once a Mitty-esque dream of things past and a poetic assertion of a unity that does not exist.

Still, the diverse Arab peoples do have much in common. They tend to be both puritan and morbidly erotic. They are emotional--at feasts or in war--to the point of delirium. They carry on ancient forms of politeness and hospitality, which, Princeton Scholar Morroe Berger suggests, help to control the most violent impulses of aggression. Yet they are also patient to the point of crippling fatalism, a trait reflected in the constant phrases, inshallah (if God wills it), malesh (it does not matter), and bukra (tomorrow). Above all, what they have in common is a language. "An Arab is anyone whose mother tongue is Arabic," says Gamal Abdel Nasser. It is not only the chief bond, but a chief source of trouble. Its whole stress is on rhetoric and resonance, not meaning and content. How poetically an Arab speaks is far more important than what he says. "In Arabic," asserts one specialist, "the medium squared is the message."

Forbidden wine by the Prophet, Arabs often grow intoxicated on words. Florid exaggeration is a supreme Arab art. An Arab refugee does not tell the facts; he utters an epic of lament: "Words cannot describe the disaster we have suffered!" An Arab general does not say he will attack with 50 tanks; he is more likely to mention 50,000. Arabs do not want to admit Israelis can shoot; they say enemy guns use a new "homing device." Damascus radio is not just critical of U.S. policy; it depicts "fat, mad" President Johnson "drinking Arab blood" and warns, "O Johnson, drinking blood will destroy your stomach."

Sophisticated Arabs often explain that in the Arab world, everyone understands that exaggerated language is not to be taken literally and that the West must not take it literally either. Still, elfyza (verbalization) decisively shapes Arab thought and action. Arabic tends to act as a compensatory mechanism, producing a world far more attractive than the real one. Such an escape from reality was the recent blatant Nasser-Hussein lie that Anglo-American planes helped Israel. Arabs believed it because it could have happened: Arab truth is meant to be only approximate or potential. There is no credibility gap among Arabs, so long as a statement, however fantastic, fits in with what they want to hear. "Everyone knows that Jews cannot fight," Arabs explain. "Therefore somebody else must have fought for them."

The Rise of an Empire

Language is also a vital element of the Moslem religion. Mohammed's one miracle was the Koran's language: the fact that this highly literate and eloquent body of precepts suddenly flowed from the mouth of an illiterate merchant in 7th century Mecca. The book of 77,934 words, memorized by millions for 50 generations, embodies much of Judaism and Christianity, which sprang out of the same awe-inspiring desert. Both simpler and more static, Islam postulates a fixed way of life ordained by God and transmitted to man through a series of mortal messengers (prophets), notably Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Until Mohammed, man misinterpreted the message, but the Prophet revealed it correctly. He permitted Moslems four wives (he had about a dozen) and invented a masculine eternity full of nubile virgins, a paradise assured by good works and obedience to simple rules, such as praying to Mecca five times daily. The quickest way to heaven was by dying in a holy war to spread the faith, the only war permitted.

Islam had no priests, only "teachers," and virtually no theology. Crucial to its later stagnation was the fact it had no analogy to Christ's martyrdom, no sense of suffering in the Jewish pattern that might have prepared Moslems for adversity. Islam was an instant success. In the power vacuum left by the disintegration of the last remnants of Roman and Byzantine order, Mohammed's hard-riding followers quickly achieved one of the world's greatest military conquests. Armed with fast cavalry and such innovations as the stirrup (giving lancers leverage), Arabs swept east to India and west to France, subjugating Persia, Egypt and Spain. Within 100 years, they won an empire bigger than the one the Romans had built up in 600 years, and they commanded the world's trade routes from Canton to Cordova.

No mere destroyers, the fighters under the banners of Islam set up garrisons and developed a high culture. The world owes to them algebra, trigonometry, many chemical compounds, pioneering work in astronomy, medicine and horticulture. Yet missing in Arab science was any true sense of creativity; despite its technical inventions, it regarded knowledge more as a matter of gathering the known than exploring the unknown.

The Fall of a Culture

The Arabs' empire failed because they lacked the skill of political synthesis. In conquered territory, Arab rulers hewed to the Koran and tended to let the conquered govern themselves. Mohammed designated no successor (caliph); his squabbling heirs split Islam into rival sects. For a time, independent Moslem states retained Mohammed's vigor. While Europe slept, great Arab universities flourished in Cordova, Baghdad and Cairo; in Spain, the Arab philosopher Averroes revitalized Aristotle. After the death of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in 809, the Baghdad caliphate plunged into civil war; in succeeding centuries, marauding Mongols poured into the Arab lands, killing people and wrecking schools. In two centuries, ending in 1291, Arabs fought off eight Christian Crusades. Gradually, the caliphs lost touch with their people, becoming decorative mollusks. Finally the Arabs lost even their economic importance to the world; by sailing around Africa to India in 1498, the Portuguese outflanked Arab ports and customs stations. After seizing Egypt in 1517, the Ottoman Turks ossified Arab culture, banning Arabic except in courts and mosques, halting poetry, science and education--just as the European Renaissance was in full bloom.

Asleep for three centuries, the Arabs awoke from isolation when Napoleon took Egypt in 1798. At first they were fascinated by Western ideas, from mixed bathing to parliamentary democracy. Western imperialism, symbolized by the Suez Canal, changed the fascination to hostility. Britain "temporarily" occupied Egypt in 1882--and stayed 75 years. By 1914, Britain, France, Italy and Spain owned all of North Africa, manipulating puppet princes, exempting themselves from local law and suffocating local initiative. European goods carried little or no duty; native industries were taxed to death. Britain long held spending for Egyptian education to 1% of the budget; France left Algerians 85% illiterate. A few collaborators grew rich: a mere .5% of Egyptians owned 36% of all arable land; 1.5% pocketed 50% of the national income. As one result, there was no development of a middle class, which might have created viable economies and stable governments.

By 1920, Europeans controlled virtually the whole Arab world--the largely bitter fruit of Arab cooperation with Britain against the Ottoman Turks in World War I. At the time, the growing Zionist movement argued that Palestine was a "land without people for a people without land." In fact, it contained 640,000 Arabs. Even so, in different circumstances, the Arabs might well have been able to accept a Jewish state in their midst. But against this historical background it was easy for nationalist propaganda to inflame the Arab masses and to make the establishment of Israel seem like the ultimate indignity. In Arab eyes, the West was not only using the Jews as agents to colonize Palestine but to eject its native population. Arabs see Israelis as naked aggressors, the spearhead of a Western attack on their entire culture.

Clearly, the West wrote a recipe for revolution. But the army-backed regimes that have seized power in many Arab countries since 1948 have not harnessed the revolution to constructive ends. They seethed in self-pity and plunged into irrational external misadventures rather than rational internal development. Admittedly, they faced huge obstacles. One of the major inhibitors of Arab progress remains Islam. As a religion, Islam goes on attracting millions of non-Arabs, from Nigeria to Pakistan and the Philippines. It is clear, reassuring, tolerant; even animists can profess it without giving up their assorted spooks. Here and there, it has been able to change with the times. To almost all Arabs, though, Islam is still God's perfect society--and the problem is how to respond to the upsetting fact that Western technological society is evidently a lot more effective. Arnold Toynbee points out that Moslem Turkey solved the dilemma by separating church and state, jettisoning Islamic law in secular matters, adopting Swiss and Italian legal codes, switching from Arab to Latin script, and inspiring Turks to enter commerce against Islamic tradition. But unlike the Turks, who still retain much of the brash confidence of Ottoman rulers, Arabs are unable to shed Islam's heavy hand. Arab culture has no positive secular alternative to religion. As Harvard Divinity School's Wilfred Cantwell Smith puts it: "The Arab world has had no Tom Paine or Voltaire." Besides, the Judeo-Christian tradition enables man, in the freedom of his will, to contend with nature, even with God. The notion of such creative tension is alien and frightening to Islam.

The Need for Ego

Along with the Moslem religion, centuries of foreign occupation have left the mass of Arabs with scant sense of nationhood, cooperation or civic responsibility. The masses today are a political factor, but they are not politically active in the usual sense. Says Nadav Safran, Harvard professor of government: "The relationship can be compared to a circus. The people are the audience and the government is the performer. The audience expresses its approval or disapproval, and the performers respond to the cheering or the booing. But neither feels that the audience enjoys any right to determine what acts should be performed, or in what order, or how." The Arab's loyalty is to himself, his family, his tribe. Long isolation has stunted Arab mechanical skills, and so have traditional social prejudices. The manual worker is still looked down on; every self-respecting Arab always had some underling to take care of his camel, and many Arab mechanics feel that they are lowering themselves by taking care of machines. It is true that Egyptian engineers have done an excellent job running the Suez Canal and the Lebanese have developed some highly mechanized agriculture. Yet these are the exceptions. Basically, the Arab yearns for Western technology, but does not comprehend or want the Western ethos that makes the technology possible.

The tragedy is that the Arabs' humiliation over their failure to catch up has been projected into hatred of dynamic Israel and all the "Western" attitudes it represents. In the Arab case, self-contempt has not been a goad to positive achievement, as it sometimes can be, but rather to self-destruction. Today it is often forgotten that Nasser's 1952 revolution began as the most promising event in modern Arab history. Here was a completely secular government devoid of Islamic hobbles, one that stopped barefoot wretches from sleeping in the Cairo streets and moved them into high-rise apartments. Here was a leader who asserted that the Koran could be made compatible with "Arab socialism," who emancipated women, started birth control, planned the Aswan Dam, produced nuclear energy, renounced Egypt's claim to the Sudan, and even sought a Palestine settlement. Yet even Nasser could not resist the temptation of turning from the slow, difficult tasks of true growth toward the easier course--feeding his people's hunger with visions of revenge on Israel. Russia chose to arm the fantasy. In the end, Nasser bluffed and blustered himself into war and defeat, and mortgaged his country as a pawn of the Soviet power struggle against the West.

At heart, most of the Arab masses may really be indifferent toward Israel, but they have been so hypnotized by propaganda that they no longer realize this. There is an aching need for one courageous Arab leader to call reality by its name and break the spell of illusion. But it can scarcely happen now. It probably cannot happen until the Arabs begin to feel "equal and different" toward the West, including Israel; until they find sources of pride and confirmation of manhood in causes other than holy war; until they begin to distinguish the difference between word and deed. That day seems remote.

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