In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER FOUR WHAT MODERNIZATION REQUIRES OF THE ARABS . . . IS THEIR DE-ARABIZATION Imagining a Transformed Middle East In September 1969, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research forwarded a lengthy research paper to the secretary of state. Thirtyone pages long, “The Roots of Arab Resistance to Modernization” sought to explain why “the Arabs of the Near East [were] failing to fulfill their aspirations to become modern men, as the term is understood in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.” The paper contended that “the cause does not lie in external forces, as is frequently rationalized, but in internal ones that lie at the very core of the Arab system of social relationships and values.” Social relationships in the Middle East were allegedly dominated by the competing forces of authoritarianism, which promoted conformity, inhibited religious reform and independent thinking, and created atomism, through which strict adherence to clan or family-based identities prevented loyalty to larger identities, except those based on religion.Traditional Islamic and Arab thought and value systems supposedly perpetuated these forces. Nowhere was it more evident than in “The Failure of Arab Education as an Instrument of Modernization,” a topic of eight pages of the report.The education system, the report claimed, could not advance modernization because it emphasized memorization and the prestige of attendance over learning critical thinking and other problem-solving skills. In short, Arabs could not live up to western standards of modernization because of who they were, their social relationships , and their cultural and religious practices.1 The paper concluded that there was little cause for optimism that the Middle East would modernize in the near future. The people of the region IMAGINING A TRANSFORMED MIDDLE EAST 141 were “not successfully coping with the problems posed by modernization. The cause clearly lies in the fact that the society is saturated with values and social and intellectual attitudes that produce dysfunction in the modern institutions and techniques that are borrowed from abroad.” The secular nationalists had in some cases succeeded in challenging Islam’s dominance, but had not been able to build within the populace sufficient loyalty to individual states, a sense of “patriotism,” to overcome the prevailing atomism. Secular national and “revolutionary” states might build some loyalty, but that loyalty was typically given either to the individual leader, such as Nasser, or to a vague notion of change that was pursued “at too fast a pace and by ineffective methods because [the revolutionary leaders] do not understand that the problem is one of strong and deep forces in Arab Islamic culture that are inimical to modernization in the Western sense.” Change was occurring, but it was “much more rapid in the material than in the non-material sphere. It is in the latter, however, that the key to true modernization lies.” The first sentence of the final paragraph of the paper encapsulated the prevailing view: “What modernization requires of the Arabs, in effect, is their de-Arabization.”2 This chapter places the informal transnational network of specialists’ analyses and frustrations of the late 1960s—exemplified by the State Department ’s 1969 report and evident in many other sources—in the context of half a century’s worth of sacred and secular efforts to imagine and achieve a transformed Middle East.Those efforts began in 1918, a year members of the Inquiry and the King-Crane Commission believed provided a unique opportunity to bring change to the Middle East. They therefore promoted U.S. involvement in a proposed series of League of Nations mandates to supervise the transformation of the Middle East into a set of modern nation-states.The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, however, meant that from the late 1920s through the late 1940s the pursuit of America’s sacred and secular mission through a policy of liberal developmentalism was left to the private sector, particularly U.S. companies involved in the nascent Middle Eastern oil industry. Our attention then shifts to the late 1940s and early 1950s, which marked two key developments. First, the rise of new social science methodologies and concepts led to new efforts to measure literacy rates, population growth rates, poverty rates, disease rates, and more, which were then used to classify the peoples and places of the Middle East in a larger international hierarchy of development and underdevelopment. Second , beginning in the late 1940s, the U.S. government assumed more direct responsibility for trying to bring about a transformed Middle East...

Share