Some years ago I heard through my literary agent that a well-known American publisher was interested in commissioning a book on the Arab world which would try to make intelligible to the general reader 'the Arab reluctance to join in the progress of the twentieth century'.

This assumption about the Arab character seemed to bear out the need for a book of this kind because, as I wrote in the foreword to a draft synopsis, to most Westerners the word 'Arab' still seemed to conjure up a picture of a shaikh in flowing robes, brandishing an outdated rifle as he urged his camel across the sand dunes to attack a neighbouring encampment. But the reaction of an equally famous London publisher to the offer of the British rights to such a book was also interesting. He said that I was 'setting up a cockshy' in describing the Western idea of the Arabs. This may have been the Western concept of the Arabs some twenty-five years ago, he wrote, but it certainly isn't nowadays, at least among the intelligent public for whom the book is intended.

This made me wonder whether I had exaggerated Western ignorance about the Arabs. I was reminded of a passage in the memoirs of a former American oil company official:

During our first week at the Aramco school on Long Island, questions were asked of us to ascertain our general knowledge about the Arab world. The questions 'What is Islam?' and 'Who was the Prophet Mohammed?' brought forth some interesting answers. One of our members thought that Islam was 'a game of chance, similar to bridge'. Another said it was 'a mysterious sect founded in the south by the Ku Klux Klan'. One gentleman believed it to be 'an organization of American Masons who dress in strange costumes'. The Prophet Mohammed was thought to be the man who 'wrote The Arabian Nights'. Another said he was 'an American Negro minister who was in competition with Father Divine in New York City'. One of the more reasonable answers came from one of our men who said, 'Mohammed had something to do with a mountain. He either went to the mountain, or it came to him.'(1)

These responses were facetious but the jokes were clearly intended to conceal total ignorance. The question arises whether Europeans, with their longer associations with the Arab world, would fare better than the Americans. My conclusion after studying the matter at both ends for thirty years, is that the difference is only marginal. The outdated view of the Arabs is still widespread and it is constantly reinforced by countless newspaper cartoons and selective television images which concentrate on the romantic and colourful aspect of the Arabs because it provides the most striking contrast with our own world. As for the Islamic religion, the attitude towards it in the Western world is based on an equal mixture of prejudice and ignorance.

One of the main problems was raised at the beginning of this book (see pp. 13-14): the semantic one of 'who or what is an Arab?' The confusion is the fault of no one but is a result of the historical development of the Arab nation through the 'arabization' of other races. But it is reproduced in the minds of Western schoolchildren in a multitude of history and geography textbooks. A few years ago I was asked to revise the entry for the word 'Arab' in a widely circulated children's encyclopedia. This began fairly well. 'The simple meaning of the name Arab is "inhabitant of Arabia", but the people of Arabia have been very important in the history of the world, and have gone on to live in many other countries, so the name is also used to mean anyone who speaks Arabic and claims that he is descended from Shem, who was one of the sons of Noah.' Although I have yet to meet an Arab who claims to be descended from Shem, at least this attempts to explain that there are two historical meanings for the word Arab. But the entry continued:

The Arabs of Arabia are usually medium-sized with long and sometimes curved noses and oval faces. Their skin is brownish and their hair is dark brown or black. Those who live in towns nowadays often wear clothes like European people [sic], but the peasants of the villages and the desert tribes wear the Arab dress. Many Arabs are highly educated and trained and work as scientists, engineers, or in other professions. Most Arabs who live in towns can read and write. They work as traders, craftsmen and clerks and they usually have only one wife. However, there are many more peasants, fellahin, than townsmen. The fellahin still live in tribes under the role of a sheikh, and have tribal laws which are very strictly kept. A peasant sometimes has as many as four wives if he has money to keep them. The sheikhs own land, and employ peasants to work for them. They use camels to carry burdens but usually ride on donkeys.

By this time the child who was trying to learn something about the Arabs could hardly be more confused. The author (or authors?) of this encyclopedia entry, after correctly making the distinction between the two meanings of the word Arab, has mixed them up again. If he was referring to Arabia, there are very few peasant farmers in the peninsula. If he meant the whole Arab world, the great majority do not 'still live in tribes under the rule of a sheikh' and strict tribal law. In the case of Egypt, which is the country most commonly associated with the term fellahin, this has not been true for a very long time.

If the expert confuses the modern and classical meanings of the word Arab it is hardly surprising that even the well-informed Westerner makes the same mistake. But there is a more profound reason for the distortion of the Arab image in the West: the anti-Islamic prejudice which has gone deep into our subconscious where it continues to tinge all our thinking. In his Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, Norman Daniel traces one of the main causes of this hostility to the shock that was caused to medieval Christians by the Muslim attitude towards Jesus Christ (p. 24). If Muslims had simply denied that there was any truth in Christianity, instead of regarding it as an incomplete version of their own faith, it might have been easier for Christians to accept Islam's existence.

For Christians the prophetic preparation of the Jews leads to a single event, the incarnation, which is the inauguration of the Messianic Kingdom ... For Muslims too there is just one Revelation, of the only religion, Islam, or submission to God; but it was made again and again though successive prophets. Muhammad's was the final prophecy, but his was not more 'Muslim' than that of Jesus, or Moses, or Abraham 'who was neither a Jew nor a Christian' (according to the Koran, iii, 60). For the Latin it was an impossible imaginative effort so to suspend belief that the association of sacred names, which includes the most sacred of all, would seem anything but grotesque; yet it would be a mistake to imagine that medieval writers were ill-informed. There is evidence that they believed as much as they were willing to believe, and all who knew the Islamic reassessment of the familiar sequence of God's servants found it intolerable. As a result Islam was often deformed when it was presented by Christians.

the great battle between Christian Europe and the world of Islam which began in the seventh century and ended only with the stemming of the Ottoman tide in eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. All the fears, animosities and suspicions of these times are reflected, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, in the contemporary Western writings (as indeed they are in the Arabic writings of the time), both prose and verse, lay and ecclesiastical. They therefore form part of the literary heritage of every educated European and are embedded in the subject matter of his general reading. Of course, the modern European and American reader would generally dismiss with a smile as quaint any hostile references to the Moor or the Saracen. But he would be less than human if he does not at the same time admit into his subconscious a smaller or larger number of prejudices. One residue of these prejudices is the facility with which the word 'oriental' is still pre-fixed to such words as 'duplicity', 'cruelty, 'servility', and 'despotism'. Another is possibly the general misunderstanding that exists about Islam ... (2)

Khalidi observes that there is a group of twentieth- century orientalists who have arrived at a critical estimation of Islam 'which is at once profound, authoritative and sympathetic'. But they are scholars whose writings influence only a tiny minority. 'To the average and perhaps more than average educated Westerner, Islam appears as a fanatical, bloodthirsty, reactionary, xenophobic, and largely destructive force. The obvious present-day poverty and material backwardness of most Islamic countries (due to a variety of causes which I cannot go into now) are all too easily equated with Islam itself.' The contribution of the Arab Islamic world to Western civilization through its preservation of the Graeco-Roman heritage during the Dark Ages is usually underestimated. Kenneth Clark in his famous television series on Civilization ignored it entirely. It was left to the author/scientist Jacob Bronowski to make amends in his own series entitled The Ascent of Man.

In the nineteenth century the adjective 'fanatical' was almost automatically prefixed to 'Muslim' (or, more probably, the widely used misnomer 'Mohammedan') by journalists, travel writers, or even reputable historians. The underlying prejudice has scarcely diminished today. Khalidi quoted from a feature article by the Cairo correspondent of the London Times on 29 April 1955:

Beyond the garden of the church you my meet Islam. [Emphasis added.] A man has died and his wife is mourning her loss, helped by many female friends and sympathizers. They squat in the dust of the village street, all shrouded in black ... There they sit in the filth (tin cans, fluttering rubbish and indefinable debris), wailing, screeching and clutching their clothes.

Khalidi comments on this that there is no doubt that the correspondent saw these women. 'He saw a group of very poor women in deep distress who happened to be Muslims in a village with obviously rather inadequate town planning and municipal arrangements, but he did not meet Islam in the rubbish.'

The prolonged medieval and Renaissance struggle between Western Christendom and the world of Islam was a conflict between equals. There was mutual hostility and even hatred -- but there was mutual respect. This changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the European Christian powers achieved overwhelming technical and material expansion. The hostility and fear in the attitude of these powers towards other creeds were replaced by contempt for their lack of practical achievement. Islam was doubly condemned because after nearly dominating the world it had entered a period of long physical decline. In Western eyes, it was a proven failure. Lord Cromer, who ruled Egypt for the British from 1883 to 1907, was a foremost example of this attitude. He divided the people of the world into 'Ruling Races' and 'Subject Races' and regarded this as a permanent feature of the universe. Arthur Balfour held a similar view, although he characteristically wrapped it in a mantle of dubious sophistry. In a debate on the situation in Egypt in June 1910 he was replying, as Leader of the Conservative Opposition, to the accusation of some radical MPs that the Tories adopted a superior attitude towards 'orientals'. He said:

Look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self- government, not always associated, I grant, with all the virtues or all the merits, but still have merits of their own. Nations of the West have shown these virtues from their beginning, from the very tribal origin of which we have first knowledge. You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government ... Conqueror has succeeded conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen on, of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government. That is the fact. It is not a question of superiority or inferiority. I suppose that a true Eastern sage would say that the working government which we have taken upon ourselves in Egypt and elsewhere is not a work worthy of a philosopher -- that it is the dirty work, the inferior work, of carrying on the necessary tabour. Do let us put this question of superiority and inferiority out of our minds. (3)

The underlying anti-Arab bias of Western liberals has required some self-justification. One of the most common forms of rationalization is related to the small group of distinguished Western arabists, such as France's Marshal Lyautey or Britain's Glubb Pasha. Although these men had a profound and genuine sympathy for the Arabs they were undeniably of a right-wing imperialist cast of mind. From this it was an easy stage to deduce that all Arab sympathizers were, at best, sentimental romantics and, at worst, sinister reactionaries who were trying to maintain imperial control through Arab puppets. This argument could be supported by the fact that many of the Arabs are still at a pre-capitalist stage of development and governed by feudal traditions. So are many of the other peoples of the Third World, but they cannot be directly contrasted with the state of Israel, with its multi-party democratic system and trade unions. Progressive-minded Westerners therefore dubbed the Arabs as incurable reactionaries. In 1956 a British left-wing journalist who has since achieved considerable prominence as an editor and author replied to a letter from me in which I tentatively suggested that the British left showed an excessive bias in favour of Israel and a misunderstanding of Arab nationalism:

The Israelis are progressive, democratic and western-minded. The Arabs are obscurantist, totalitarian, lazy and violent. I am sorry that you appear to have fallen a victim to the charms of their way of life -- which, I must admit, are considerable. I have always taken the Arab side against the French and still do: but I have never found working with them and for them agreeable. They are dirty, treacherous and untruthful, totally lacking in gratitude, intellectually dishonest and riddled with atavistic prejudices ... I find it tragic that you should take the view you do. The Foreign Office has always been hopelessly handicapped in dealing with the Middle East because a great proportion of its officials are emotionally involved with the Arabs.

I have quoted this personal letter at length because it encapsulates with admirable frankness and clarity all the aspects of anti-Arab emotional prejudice in Western left-wing circles. Since this letter was written, the question has been complicated by some new elements. First there was the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt of October 1956 which caused most of the European left to take, for a brief period, a more sympathetic view of Arab nationalism.Then there has been the slow dimming of Israel's progressive democratic image, especially after the 1967 war and the military occupation of Arab lands. This had been ignored by some Western liberals but others have felt the need to make some protest. One of these was the prominent pro-Zionist Richard Crossman who left the British cabinet to become editor of the New Statesman. On 31 July 1970 he published an open letter to the Israeli foreign minister deploring the loss of the early Zionist vision, and ending with the words: 'The Arabs can survive a decade of Jewish military domination. The Israel you and I believe in can't.' At the same time the cause of the Palestinian Arabs caught the imagination of many of the new generation of students in the west. A 'Palestine Week' became a regular annual feature of many university campuses. However, this new sympathy for the Arabs in the form of Palestinians was more than counterbalanced by the effect of a new phenomenon: the 'Arab oil shaikh' extorting his 'blackmail' payments from the West. It made no difference that the country which was taking the lead in putting up oil prices was not an Arab state but Iran, or that the peoples of the Arab world were still very much poorer than those of the West. 'The Arab shaikhs' were represented as a group of self-indulgent but ruthless men who were responsible for the West's economic difficulties. The word 'shaikh', with all its connotations of feudal power and sexual voracity, reinforced the impression. It was a gift for the cartoonists. One of them showed an obese Arab prince in his palace announcing that his contribution to World Hunger Year was to stop his wives from dining twice a week at the Savoy.

However much headway the Palestinian Arabs may have made in gaining support for their cause, a degree of bias against the Arabs is considered normal among Western liberals who would find it quite unacceptable if it was directed against other races.

That strong feeling in the liberal establishments of Western countries which has been called 'anti-anti- semitism' and is partly a reaction to the past persecution of the Jews and partly to guilt feelings about our own responsibility serves as an obstacle to understanding of the Arabs. At any time it is possible to secure hundreds of signatures of the most distinguished men and women in politics, the professions or the arts for an appeal for Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. A similar appeal to allow Palestinian Arabs to return to the homes they left under duress only a generation ago arouses little interest.

It is understandable that the great majority of Arabs are convinced that Zionist influence is the sole obstacle to their relations with the West. Some see the matter in simple nineteenth- century terms of Jewish financial and political power. Others, more sophisticated, speak of the crucial Jewish influence in all aspects of Western intellectual life -- in teaching, the arts and the news media.

But while it would be absurd to deny the strength of Zionism in Western society, it is not by any means the only cause of misunderstanding between the Arabs and the West. (It is surely significant that a Palestinian Arab of the intellectual calibre of Walid Khalidi does not even mention Zionism in his 'Arabs and the West'.) The truth is that the struggle between Christendom and the World of Islam has never really ended, although it is being fought on different battlefields and with new weapons. In the nineteenth century it seemed as if the victory of Christendom was final, although its opponents never conceded defeat. Today we are not so sure. The overthrow of the regime in Iran, which was attempting to emulate the West, by a mass popular Islamic movement gave pause for thought. Today the phenomenon of Islamic revival is seen throughout the Muslim world but most strikingly among Iranians and Arabs. Its often violent manifestations have if anything increased the anti-Islamic and anti-Arab prejudices of Westerners who have neither the time nor inclination to understand its origins.

(2) Walid Khatidi, 'Arabs and the West', Middle East Forum, xxxii, (10 December 1957), P.15