Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Since I began writing this book, the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian strife, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have put the Middle East even more prominently onto the center stage of world history. Samuel Huntington has ominously predicted that the twenty-first century would see a “clash of civilizations” pitting Islam against the West, and Samuel Barber described globalization as culminating in a struggle of “Jihad versus McWorld.” I hope this book might help put the daily headlines in a broader perspective, by describing psychological dimensions of traditional ways of life in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and of the impact of “modernization” and “underdevelopment.” It will not offer psychological explanations for the region’s economic and political problems, or for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it will consider what Arab social scientists have been writing about the inner consequences of economic stagnation and political despotism, and about Middle Easterners’ current attempts to “become modern” while conserving what they see as their authentic traditions.