Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Still, the diverse Arab peoples do have much in common. They tend to be both puritan and morbidly erotic. They are emotional-at feasts or in war-to the point of delirium. They carry on ancient forms of politeness and hospitality, which, Princeton Scholar Morroe Berger suggests, help to control the most violent impulses of aggression. Yet they are also patient to the point of crippling fatalism, a trait reflected in the constant phrases, inshallah (if God wills it), malesh (it does not matter), and bukra (tomorrow). Above all, what they have in common is a language. "An Arab...
Forbidden wine by the Prophet, Arabs often grow intoxicated on words. Florid exaggeration is a supreme Arab art. An Arab refugee does not tell the facts; he utters an epic of lament: "Words cannot describe the disaster we have suffered!" An Arab general does not say he will attack with 50 tanks; he is more likely to mention 50,000. Arabs do not want to admit Israelis can shoot; they say enemy guns use a new "homing device." Damascus radio is not just critical of U.S. policy; it depicts "fat, mad" President Johnson "drinking Arab blood" and warns, "O Johnson...
Sophisticated Arabs often explain that in the Arab world, everyone understands that exaggerated language is not to be taken literally and that the West must not take it literally either. Still, elfyza (verbalization) decisively shapes Arab thought and action. Arabic tends to act as a compensatory mechanism, producing a world far more attractive than the real one. Such an escape from reality was the recent blatant Nasser-Hussein lie that Anglo-American planes helped Israel. Arabs believed it because it could have happened: Arab truth is meant to be only approximate or potential. There is no credibility gap among Arabs...
...mere destroyers, the fighters under the banners of Islam set up garrisons and developed a high culture. The world owes to them algebra, trigonometry, many chemical compounds, pioneering work in astronomy, medicine and horticulture. Yet missing in Arab science was any true sense of creativity; despite its technical inventions, it regarded knowledge more as a matter of gathering the known than exploring the unknown...
...Arabs' empire failed because they lacked the skill of political synthesis. In conquered territory, Arab rulers hewed to the Koran and tended to let the conquered govern themselves. Mohammed designated no successor (caliph); his squabbling heirs split Islam into rival sects. For a time, independent Moslem states retained Mohammed's vigor. While Europe slept, great Arab universities flourished in Cordova, Baghdad and Cairo; in Spain, the Arab philosopher Averroes revitalized Aristotle. After the death of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in 809, the Baghdad caliphate plunged into civil war; in succeeding centuries, marauding Mongols poured into the Arab...