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National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: Day to Day (4:00 PM ET) - NPR
June 1, 2004 Tuesday
LENGTH: 742 words

HEADLINE: Book called "The Arab Mind" and its possible influence in shaping the Bush administration's view of the Arab world

ANCHORS: MADELEINE BRAND

BODY:
MADELEINE BRAND, host:

In a recent New Yorker article about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, writer Seymour Hersh mentioned a book he said helped shape the Bush administration's view of the Arab world. The book is "The Arab Mind" by the late Raphael Patai, first published in the mid-1970s. I spoke with Slate contributor Lee Smith, who lived in the Middle East until recently and has written an assessment of the book.

LEE SMITH (Slate):

Whether there's an exact connection between this book and the different ideas that the Bush administration has about the Arab world, I just think that's probably stretching it a little too far.

BRAND: Well, how do you account for its popularity?

SMITH: Patai was the kind of scholar who liked to popularize difficult ideas. And even though I myself think the title is kind of gross, it's a title that manages to appeal to a lot of people, because between two covers they have an answer to everything they want to look at. And, unfortunately, that's just not the case.

BRAND: Well, I suppose it is tantalizing to be able to crack open a book and receive answers to what is mystifying to a lot of people.

SMITH: Sure.

BRAND: You know, I remember after 9/11, people kept asking the why-do-they-hate-us question.

SMITH: Right. Another thing to remember is, it was written at a time when this kind of cultural anthropology was a little more popular, that you could take an entire culture and sort of reduce it to these different traits and understand this culture through these different things. You could talk about language, you could talk about relationships, you could talk about different values. And that would, you know, abstract all of these things, throw in some studies, and then you would get a pretty clear picture of the way this society operated. Now, cultural anthropologists, they really don't write like that anymore.

BRAND: So I wonder, though, if our leaders in Washington are using this as a reference book--and that's a big if--if they're not getting some distorted picture and maybe are basing their assumptions on reactions to whatever policies that we implement erroneously.

SMITH: Well, certainly the idea that making Iraq a democratic state and that would, you know, affect the rest of the region, send ripples throughout the rest of the region and make all the other Arabs demand democracy as well, that this would clean up the region, then yeah, that's certainly assuming that Arabs are very closely connected like that, that there is some deep connection.

BRAND: There's a whole chapter in the book devoted to the Arab view of sex.

SMITH: Mm-hmm.

BRAND: And Seymour Hersh's article suggested that this could have had some influence in the idea of using sexual humiliation for the Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib as a way to get information from them.

SMITH: Right.

BRAND: Does that seem plausible to you?

SMITH: One of the things that you find out in the Patai book is that, actually, they're not really that different. For instance, he makes the case--he's reading a different study where he says that it's found that some researchers discovered that Arab adolescents started having sexual experiences about a year after American adolescents did. It's just not that big a difference. So a lot of the differences between cultures are really kind of exaggerated for sensationalist effect. Again, if the Bush administration got this kind of information out of it, I think they were probably misreading the book.

BRAND: Say I knew nothing about Arab culture...

SMITH: Mm-hmm.

BRAND: ...I have never met an Arab person, I've never seen an Arab person speak on TV...

SMITH: Uh-huh.

BRAND: ...what kind of impression would I get if I read this book?

SMITH: You couldn't help but get an impression that it's an entirely strange, foreign and bizarre culture, absolutely unlike your own. You now, Patai kind of works against that a little bit. He says, well--at different points--he says it's not that different from the West, not that different from American culture. But definitely the impression you get walking away from this book, putting this book down, is, wow, what a weird, freaky place.

BRAND: Opinion and analysis from Slate contributor Lee Smith. And you'll find his article about the book "The Arab Mind" at slate.com.

Thanks a lot, Lee, for joining us.

SMITH: Thank you.

BRAND: This is DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

LOAD-DATE: June 1, 2004