p dir=ltrAfter decades spent trying to better explain the Arab world to other Americans, all too often I would find myself running up against the same mythologies and half-truths that, year after year, stubbornly maintain an alarming ability to shape thinking about the region./p
p dir=ltrOne of the reasons I wrote “Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters” was to challenge these myths head on. Unlike so many other books or articles that have been written about this region, “Arab Voices” is neither a retelling (or an interpretation) of history, nor is it a collection of personal anecdotes. These approaches can be useful, and there are excellent examples that have made real contributions to our understanding, but they are also susceptible to bias or to what I call “bad scie?ce” - as in the case of writers with a penchant for elevating an observation or a conversation to a generalised conclusion (the musings of Tom Friedman comes to mind)./p
p dir=ltrMy starting point is hard data, derived from more than a decade of polling Zogby International has conducted across the Middle East. Where I use personal anecdotes, it is to “put flesh on the bones” of the numbers in order to help tell the stories of those Arabs whose realities we must understand./p
p dir=ltrI love polling (and not merely because my brother John is in the business). Polling opens a window and lets in voices we seldom hear. When we ask 4,000 Arabs from Morocco to the United Arab Emirates to tell us their attitudes towards the United States, to identify their most important political concerns, their attitudes towards women in the workplace, or what programmes they watch on television - when we organise their responses by country, and by age or gender or class, and then listen to what they are sa?ing - we are able to pierce through the fog of myth and learn./p
p dir=ltrAnd learning is important because, for too long, our understanding of this region and its peoples has been clouded by distorted stereotypes and myths, which have dominated our thinking and, in some cases, have shaped our policies./p
p dir=ltrI look at each of these myths in “Arab Voices” and then contrast the assumptions and misperceptions behind them with polling data that reveals what Arabs really think./p
p dir=ltrThe five myths I examine are:/p
p dir=ltr1. Are Arabs all the same and can they, therefore, be reduced to a “type” (as in “all Arabs are this or that”)? Reading the broad generalisations and crude caricatures of Arabs found in Raphael Patai’s “Arab Mind” (used as a training manual by the US military in Iraq) or Tom Friedman’s “Mid East Rules to Live By” might lead one to think so. But our polling reveals a very different view./p
p dir=ltrWhat we find when we survey public opinion is a rich and varied landscape across the Arab world that defies stereotype. Not only are there diverse sub-cultures and unique histories that give texture to life, making Egyptians different than Saudis or Lebanese, there are also generational differences./p
p dir=ltrFor example, younger Arabs (who are 60 per cent of the population of this region) are caught up with globalisation and change. They share different concerns and aspire to goals different from those of their parents. They are more open to gender equality and are less tied to tradition./p
p dir=ltr2) Are Arabs so diverse that they do not constitute a world at all? That’s what “The Economist” would have us believe. In a special 2009 issue of this magazine, the editors described the region as “a big amorphous thing and arguably not a thing at all”. Once again, our polling reveals quite the opposite. Across the region, Arabs do identify as “Arabs” and they describe themselves as tied to one another by a common language (and the common history that implies) and shared political concerns, with majorities?of all generations and in all countries demonstrating a strong attachment to Palestine and the fate of the Iraqi people./p
p dir=ltr3) Are Arabs all angry, hating us, “our values” and “our way of life”? In a recent poll, we found this view to be shared by a plurality of Americans. But our work in the Arab world finds quite the opposite to be true. Arabs like the Americans; they not only respect our education and our advances in science and technology, they also like our values of “freedom and democracy”. What they don’t like are our policies towards them, which lead them to believe that we don’t like them. As one Arab businessman said ?o me, “we feel like jilted lovers”./p
p dir=ltr4) Are Arabs driven by religious fanaticism? Arabs are, like many in the West, “people of faith”, with their values shaped by their religious traditions. But mosque attendance rates across the Middle East are about the same as church attendance rates here in the US. And when we ask Arabs what programmes they prefer to watch on TV, the list is as varied as that of American viewers. In Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia (the largest countries covered in our polls) the top rated programmes are movies and soap op?ras. Religious programmes are near the bottom of the list. And when we ask Arabs to list their most important concerns, not surprisingly, the top two are the quality of their work and their families./p
p dir=ltrSo in contrast to the mythic notion that “Arabs go to bed at night hating America, wake up hating Israel, and spend their days either watching news or listening to preachers who fuel that anger”, the reality is that “Arabs go to bed each night thinking about their jobs, wake up each morning thinking about their kids, and spend each day thinking about how to improve the quality of their lives”./p
p dir=ltr5) Lastly there is the myth that Arabs reject reform and will not change, unless the West pushes them. This has been a fundamental tenet of the neoconservatives. Derived from the writings of Bernard Lewis, this myth provided one of the rationales for the Iraq war - the idea being that we would destroy the “old regime” giving birth to “the new Middle East”./p
p dir=ltrWhat our polling shows, however, is that Arabs do want reform, but the reform they want is theirs, not ours. Their top domestic priorities are: better jobs, improved healthcare and expanded educational opportunities (sounds familiar?). Our findings further demonstrate that most Arabs do not want us meddling in their internal affairs, but they would welcome our assistance in helping their societies build capacity to provide services and improve the quality of their lives./p
p dir=ltrWhen we look at the Arab world more closely and listen to Arabs more carefully, we learn that this region and its people are not as they have been imagined by Hollywood or projected by political ideologues with an axe to grind. They cannot be reduced to the mythic stereotypes that have so warped our understanding and contributed to distorting our policies. With this realisation will come the ability to engage productively with the people of this region which has become so critical to our national interests?/p