Studying the Arabs: Myths and metaphors

Studying the Arabs: Myths and Metaphors

]acqueline S. Ismael and Tareq Y Ismael

The relationship between knowledge and power is examined in this article in terms of the social science literature base on Arab countries. It is argued that knowledge imposes normative constraints on the exercise of power, and the exercise of power is dependent on the lack of knowledge. This is examined in terms of the knowledge base on Iraq and Palestine, the two countries in the Arab world most decimated in the post-World War 1I era by the exercise of external power politics. The study is organized in three phases: (1) delimiting the population of scholarly literature in the social sciences on the Middle East by country; (2) drawing representative samples of scholarly literature on Iraq and Palestine from this population; and (3) content analysis of the samples.

T he process of studying the studies is now a well-established field of inquiry in social science (Kuhn 1952; Foucault 1972). In Middle East studies, it has been

argued that it is critical to understanding the social construction of the Arab world, and that the discourse of social science constructions regarding the Arab world are directly related to the politics of power in the international arena (Said 1978). The argument is addressed here with regard to the epistemological construction of Iraq and Palestine in the scholarly literature.

It is hypothesized that the relationship between the West and the Arab world is represented in the scholarly literature in terms of myths and metaphors that legiti-

Jacqueline S. lsmael is a professor of social work at The University of Calgary. She has published a number of articles and monographs on social change in the Middle East, as well as several works on Canadian social policy. She is co-author with Tareq Y. lsmael of The People's Democratic Republic of Yemen: The Pohtics of Socialist Transformation (1986), Government and Politics in Islam (1986), Politics and Government in the Middle East and North Africa (1991), and The Gulf War and the New Worm Order (1994). Her most recent work is Kuwait: Dependency and Class in a Rentier State (1993). Tareq Y. Ismael is a professor of political science at The University of Calgary. He has written extensively on Middle East politics, the international relations of the Middle East, and ideology in the Arab world. His recent publications include International Relations of the Contemporary Middle East (1986), Middle East Studies: International Perspectives on the State of the Art (1990), The Communist Movement in Egypt (1990), Politics and Government in the Middle East and North Africa (1991), and The Gulf War and the New Worm Order (1994).

Studies in Comparatwe International Development, Summer 1995, Vol. 30, No.2, 45-57.

46 Studies in Comparative International Development / Summer 1995

mate the exercise of power politics. Myths, defined as representations of circum- stances based on invalidly generalized grains of truth, distort our understanding of the subject; metaphors, defined as analogies which imply interconnections between actors, institutions, culture, and process, lead to inferences of questionable validity, especially where myths are units in their construction (Marris 1982). In other words, the knowledge base on the Arab world is a mixture of allegorically derived and systematically derived observations.

The relationship between allegory and science is at the core of the hypothesis being examined. If it is assumed, on the one hand, that knowledge imposes normative constraints on the exercise of power, and, on the other hand, that the exercise of power unmitigated by normative constraints is dependent on the lack of knowledge, then it may be further hypothesized that the social science literature base on Arab countries in a given period will largely reflect the state of power relations in that period. In other words, the more allegoric the scholarly literature base unmitigated by systematic observation, the more brutal the exercise of power by the west (that is, the less the exercise of power will be mitigated by normative constraints). This is examined in terms of the knowledge base on Iraq and Palestine, the two countries in the Arab world most decimated in the post-World War II era by the exercise of external power politics.

The study is organized in three phases: 1) delimiting the population of scholarly literature in the social sciences on the Middle East by country; 2) drawing representative samples of scholarly literature on Iraq and Palestine/Palestinians from this population; and 3) content analysis of the samples.

Population Parameters

To include the broadest range of social science literature in the population of scholarly literature on lraq, two indexes were used: International Political Science Abstracts (IPSA) and Sociofile (CD-Rom). The years 1970 to 1992 were searched in both indexes. Sociofile abstracts from 1600 journals in 30 different languages and from 55 countries. The IPSA index draws from 42 core journals and scans hundreds of additional journals for occasional articles.

Both IPSA and Sociofile were searched for the years 1974 to 1992 for the number of total articles in all languages encompassed by the indexes on the Middle East by country. In addition, Palestine and Palestinian were also searched. The number of articles on Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Palestinian and Israel were recorded. For the Sociofile (CD-Rom) search, each country name was used as the key for the computer search. Sociofile would then display the number of records containing that search term. For example, there are 83 records containing the word "Iraq," 249 containing the word "Palestine," and 226 containing the word "Palestinian." This means that the word Iraq appears somewhere in the abstracts of 83 articles, the word Palestine in 249, and the word Palestinian in 226 as recorded in Sociofile. It does n o t mean that there are 83 articles having Iraq as

lsmad & Ismad 47

the main subject, or 249 having Palestine as the main subject, or 226 having Pales- tinians as the main subject.

The IPSA index was searched using each country name as the key search term. IPSA is indexed by subject. Each abstract number that appeared under the country name was recorded. The number of abstracts for each country were counted for each year (1974-1992).

To summarize the results, there were 9,093 articles identified by the search, with the distribution by country as shown in table 1.

Table 1 reflects, on the one hand, that the Arab world is grossly underrepresented in research on the Middle East. Of the 9,093 abstracts in the population, only 34.3 percent are on Arab countries, though they constitute seven of the nine countries included in the population.

On the other hand, Israel is extravagantly over-represented, with 54.2 percent of all the articles in the population on it. This in itself suggests a significant distortion in the knowledge base on the Middle East. In addition, however, research on the countries of the Arab world is not only limited, but itself unevenly distributed across the Arab countries. One Arab country, Egypt, accounts for 10.1 percent of the literature.

The distribution between political science and other social sciences, referred to from hereon as socio-cultural studies since the literature is drawn primarily from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, also indicates substantial distortion in the knowledge base, as indicated by table 2.

For Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the distribution of research between political science and socio-cultural studies is about even, though there is almost four times the amount of work on Egypt than Saudi Arabia. For Lebanon and Iran, the distribution is about 60-40, with politics weighing more heavily than socio-cultural topics, though there is about twice as much research on Iran than Lebanon. Jordan, Israel, and Palestine/Palestinian reflect the reverse distribution, 40-60, with socio-cultural topics weighing more heavily, though, of course, the difference in the amount of research on each country is monumental (246 abstracts on Jordan and 689 for Palestine/Palestinian versus 4,925 on Israel).

The point is that although some of these distributions are skewed in one direction or the other, they still indicate that whatever knowledge base exists in the social sciences on one of the specified countries, it is not narrowly focused but is more broadly dispersed in terms of political science and socio-cultural topics.

The distribution of research by index for Syria and Iraq reflects a very different picture, however. Not only do these two countries together comprise only six percent of all the abstracts in both indexes for the eighteen year period, 1974-1992, under review; what little work there is on these two countries in the scholarly literature is heavily skewed to political topics. For Syria, the distribution is 75-25 in IPSA; and for Iraq, it is 73-27. What this suggests is that the knowledge base here is not only limited but disproportionately focused on political topics.

While the population of scholarly literature on Iraq, delimited through the indexes, is limited and narrowly focused, what is available in English is even more

48 Studies in Comparative International Development I Summer 1995

TABLE 1 Distribution of Literature By Country

Country Number Percent

Jordan 246 2.7

Eqypt 920 10.1

Saudi Arabia 250 2.7

Iran 1,042 11.5

Syria 206 2.2

Lebanon 512 5.6

Israel 4,925 54.2

Iraq 303 3.3

Palestine/Palestinian* 689 7.7

Total 9,093 100.0%

*It should be noted that the number of titles in Sociofile is inflated by using two distinct key words: Palestine and Palestinians. There was, in fact, considerable overlap between abstracts.

restricted. There were actually only 134 articles in English on Iraq for the period 1970-92, 95 from IPSA and 35 from Sociofile.

The Sample on Iraq

The abstracts from both IPSA and Sociofile were screened to include only articles in English. This produced a list of 134 abstracts. This was further screened to include only those journals that could be found in the University of Calgary library. This resulted in the elimination of 35 articles (or 26.1 percent) from the total of 134. The resulting population consisted of 99 articles. This process revealed that the population of scholarly literature available on Iraq is small, and what is available in English is even smaller.

A random sample of 20 articles from the population of 99 was taken using a random number table for selection. The distribution of the sample by year of publication and focus of the article in terms of matters internal or external to Iraq's society is provided in table 3. On the classification of focus, three categories were designated: internal, external, and both. The operational definitions were:

external: the abstract specified an essentially exclusive focus on issues external to Iraqi society.

Ismael & Ismael 49

TABLE 2 Percentage Distribution of Literature

Country Number of Abstracts

IPSA

Percent

Egypt 920 50.4

Jordan 246 23.2 76.8

Saudi Arabia 250 53.6 46.4

lran 1,042 60.1 39.9

Syria 206 74.8 25.2

Lebanon 512 63.3 36.7

Israel 4,925 36.5 63.5

Iraq 303 72.6 27.4

Palestine/Palestinian 689 31.1

Sociofile

49.6

68.9

internal: the abstract specified an essentially exclusive focus on issues internal to Iraqi society.

both: the abstract specified both internal and external factors. All of the studies in the external category treat Iraq as an actor, with the implied

characteristics of singularity, purpose, motivation, and consciousness that are the attributes of a performer. These are all studies that address the state as an actor in the external arena. The representation of a state as an actor, a common construct in political science (especially international relations), is a myth devised to reduce complexity by essentially black-boxing the internal political, social, and economic dynamics that constitute a society or its polity.

Studies of a country as a society and/or polity may mitigate or compensate for the distortion inherent in the myth of the state as actor. But in the case of the Arab world in general and Iraq in particular, there is little challenge to the reification of the state or the dehumanization of society encompassed in the myth.

As table 3 reflects there were seven studies of Iraq from 1970 to 1980, and only two were focused exclusively on external concerns. From 1981 to 1991, there were a total of 13 studies, representing an increase of 1.85 times. Nine of these studies were exclusively external in focus, reflecting a concentration of focus 4.5 times greater than the previous decade. This increased interest on external issues is in fact explained by the Iraq-lran war, but there was no corresponding increase in attention to the other categories. In effect, this reflects the hardening and deepening of the myth as interest in the state expanded, unmitigated by a corresponding interest in the society or the polity.

Another way of describing the sample is in terms of its scientific properties.

50 Studies in Comparative International Development / Summer 1995

TABLE3 Abstracts ~ YearofPublicationandFocus

Year of Focus Pubil ication

External Internal Both

1970 1

1971 2

1976 1 -

1977 1

1979 1 1

1981 1

1982 1 -

1986 3 1

1987 1 -

1988 1 -

1989 2 1

1990 1 -

1991 1 -

Total 11

Ideally in social science, interconnections between actors, institutions, culture, and process are theoretically grounded, and specified in terms of concepts, constructs, and/or models. Theory-building, a fundamental goal in any science, entails deliber- ate and systematic examination of the correspondence between components of theory and empirical reality. Thus, it is fundamental to examine the scholarly literature in terms of whether research has conceptual and methodological validity; that is, if it is grounded in examining the correspondence between theoretically derived descrip- tive or analytic categories and empirically determined observations.

Table 4 cross-classifies the literature by theoretical and empirical content. The operational definitions are: Theoretical Foundation

explicit--theoretical foundation of study explicitly identified, with conceptual categories theoretically derived.

Ismael & Ismad 51

implicit--theoretical foundation of study alluded to. neither--no explicit or implicit attention to theory.

Empirical Observation primary--primary observation is a component of data collection. secondary--already published data is sole source of data utilized. neither--sources of data not provided. As the table reveals, the knowledge base available in English on Iraq has only a

very limited scientific basis. Only 5 of the 20 articles (25 percent of the sample) are theory driven; another 4 articles, 20 percent of the sample, allude to theory, but conceptual categories are not explicitly theoretically derived. Fifty-five percent of the sample (11 articles) provide no theoretical base at all. Without a theoretical grounding, they may rank as journalism but not scholarship. Yet, they appear in a scholarly literature base. Conceptual validity, a preoccupation of scholarship (whether based on the traditional model of logical reasoning or the contemporary scientific model which adds empiricism as the arbiter of reason) is the basis of systematic interpretation of discrete and disparate phenomena in terms of past, present, and future interconnections. Without explicit systematic attention to the theoretical component, an argument has no conceptual validity. It may have other merits, but they are not within the scope of scholarly criteria.

Observations of phenomena, the step added to scholarship by the scientific model, has validity as a central issue too. As we know, the scientific method is all about issues related to the validity of data collection. But scientific method addresses primary data collection, and only 6 articles (30 percent of the sample), entail any primary observation at all. Fifty-five percent of the sample (11 articles) relies exclusively on secondary data; and, in this case, the issue of validity is confounded because it is removed from the source of observation. On what sources do scholars writing in English about Iraq rely? As we have seen, there is little scholarship on Iraq in the indexes and even less in English. On what sources does the literature in English rely? Table 5 classifies the articles in the sample by the languages utilized in the citations.

As the table reflects, 47 percent of the articles rely exclusively on secondary observations and English-only sources. In other words, this work is not contributing any new information to the knowledge base in English. Table 4 also reflects that there is very little attention to theory. This supports the conclusion that there are no new theoretical syntheses or systematic reinterpretations that might account for the lack of empirical development but do contribute to theoretical development. Fur- thermore, it should be pointed out that the classification of primary empirical observation was, at best, generous by scientific criteria. Actually only 4 of the 6 articles so classified in table 4 used replicable methods (4 of the 5 studies in table 5, since 1 had no references at all).

What tables 3, 4 and 5 together reflect is that there is a very limited knowledge base on Iraq. In other words, much of the so-called scholarly literature on Iraq is based on recycling and reinterpreting already existing information uncritically and in atheoretical frameworks. Furthermore, since the primary unit of analysis is the


TABLE 4 Sample By Empirical And Theoretical Content

Theoretical Foundation

Empirical Observations

Primary Secondary Neither Total

Explicit 3 2 - 5

Implicit 2 2 - 4

Neither 1 7 3 11

6* Total 11 20

*Primary data collection included survey research, interviews, and primary source documents.

state, the reification of the state is essentially institutionalized in the sense that "the state" constitutes a paradigm, the dominant paradigm, in the study of lraq.

Within the framework of this paradigm, people are essentially marginalized and aren't even objects of study. Their marginalization is symbolized by their silence. Only five studies cite any Middle Eastern language at all, and just two of these include Arabic sources. Now, Arabic is a literate culture, and a substantial and diverse publication industry operates within the Arab world. The voices of the culture, however, are not relevant in a paradigm that reifies the state and focuses on state action from a behaviorist perspective. Thus, the dehumanization of a country is in effect legitimated in the framework of a social science paradigm.

So far, this article has focused on the structure of study as represented by the sample in terms of the objective characteristics of the population and the studies in the sample. The content of the articles, in effect, has been treated as the dependent variable, and has not been under direct focus. We now focus on the interpretive dimensions of the study of Iraq.

Table 6 provides a distribution of articles by subject matter (based on key word classification) and focus.

The table reveals the dominance of military and war-related articles. In fact, there were only five articles in the sample addressing other topics. Subject is juxtaposed with focus, here collapsed into two categories (external and other) to highlight the nature of the subject matter.

What the table reflects is the dominance of the myth of the state garbed in war imagery. Together, these provide the metaphor of the warrior nation. Two patterns of generalization are embodied in the transition from myth to metaphor. The first is the generalization from state to society. This was addressed in the discussion of the sample. The second is the militarization of the state, as reflected in the dominance of the military imagery. The transition is effected by the theoretical vacuum in this body of literature.

Ismad & Ismacl 53

TABLE 5 Sample by Languages of Secondary Sources and Empirical Observation

Empirical English Observation Only

English and Middle European Eastern Languages Languages

only Cited** Total

Primary 2 1 2 5

Secondary 8 3 11

Neither 1 1

Total 10 2* 5 17"**

*French and German were the only ones cited. **Operationally defined as Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish and Hebrew. ***Three papers without any sources cited are not included in table.

The Sample of Palestine/Palestinians

A comparison of the literature base on Iraq and Palestine/Palestinian reflects differences in the populations the two samples are drawn from. The literature on Iraq is heavily concentrated in political studies. The literature on Palestine/Palestin- ians, on the other hand, is heavily concentrated in socio-cultural studies. It is not only quantitatively a more substantial body of literature, it is also a more diverse, complex, and sophisticated body of literature. While the literature on Iraq is heavily focused on the state as actor, socio-cultural studies by their nature frustrate such unidimensionality. Also, there is a greater volume of primary research in the Pales- tine/Palestinian sample, with 16 of the 59 abstracts specifying primary observation as their basis of data collection.

A random sample of 59 abstracts were drawn from the population of 475 titles identified in Sociofile from the Palestine and Palestinian key word searches. The abstract for every fifth title in the population was marked, producing a total of 94 titles. Only articles published in English were included, resulting in a sample of 59.

The abstracts were content analyzed by both objective and subjective methods. The objective method was based on word classifications that identified 1) socio- cultural categories of people, and 2) political units at the national level and beyond. The subjective method was based on inference from the context. From this, five perspectives on the nature of the problem were identified. The representation of the nature of the problem suggests the parameters of issues and the dynamics propelling them. The perspectives are assumptions about the nature of the problem, not expla- nations. They are, therefore, implicit in the approach to the subject matter. The five perspectives were:


TABLE 6 Subject by Key W o r d Classif ication and Focus

Polit ics Power Elite Military Conflict Resolution

Social Groups Kurds Social Class Women

External

1 2

Focus

Other

War Iraq-Iran 4 2 Weapons 4

Total 14 6 i

1) Palestinian-Israeli problem: the nature of the problem is defined by the dynamic between lsraelis and Palestinians.

2) Arab-Israeli problem: the nature of the problem is defined by the dynamic between Arabs and lsraelis.

3) Israeli problem: the problem is essentially an internal Israeli matter. 4) Palestinian problem: the problem is essentially a Palestinian matter. 5) No perspective on the nature of the problem suggested.

Table 7, Perspectives on the Nature of the Problem, distributes the sample by perspectives and by publication period: before the Intifada, which covers the period 1974-1987 inclusive; and after the Intifada, which covers the period 1988-1992 inclusive.

As the table reveals, there were proportionally large increases in the Palestinian- Israeli perspective after the initiation of the Intifada, from 8.8 percent to 32 percent, and, in the Israeli perspective, from 14.7 percent to 28 percent. On the other hand, after the Intifada there was a proportionally large decrease in the Palestinian perspective, from 32.4 percent to 4 percent. Less dramatic before/after decreases were indicated for both the Arab-Israeli and no perspective categories.

Table 8, Perspectives by Subject Matter, classifies the perspective with subject matter as described by the abstract.

The table reveals the pattern of issues addressed in the sample. Conflict is the most common subject across perspectives, represented in all 5, and constituting the subject matter of 12 of the 59 abstracts in the sample (20.3 percent). Israeli politics, policy, society is the next largest model category, constituting the subject matter of 9 abstracts, but is represented in only two perspectives: Palestinian-lsraeli and Is-

Ismael & Ismael 55

Perspective

TABLE 7 Perspectives on the Nature of the Problem

Before the lntlfada

No. % No. %

At~er the Intifada

Palestinian-Israeli Problem 3 8.8 8 32.0

Arab-Israeli Problem 5 14.7 3 12.0

Israeli Problem 5 14.7 7 28.0

Palestinian Problem 11 32.4 1 4.0

None 10 29.4 6 24.0

Total 34 100.0 25 100.0

raeli (where, in fact, it is the modal category). Zionism follows in the rank order as the subject matter of 8 of the 59 abstracts, but it is highly concentrated in the "no perspectives" category. Public opinion and identity cluster behind Zionism, with 7 and 6 abstracts respectively.

What this reveals is the pattern of perspectives that have emerged in the social science literature base on Palestine/Palestinians over an almost twenty-year period. Table 9, Subject Matter by Time Frame, reveals the pattern of change in that literature after the initiation of the Intifada.

Table 9 reveals that subject matter became more tightly focused after the intifada, with two subjects---conflict and Israeli politics, policy and society--accounting for 56 percent of the abstracts. Before the intifada, the same two subjects accounted for about 21 percent. Public opinion was the only other subject to reflect an increase in attention. Attention to three subjects virtually disappeared in the period after the intifada--women, foreign relations, and political economy; and one new subject emerged--religious behaviour.

Conclusion

Let us emphasize that this is an exploratory study so, at best, only tentative conclusions can be drawn. With that caveat, we will take this opportunity to speculate a bit on what has been observed so far.

One observation that seems apparent relates to the differences between the En- glish language literature base on Iraq and that on Palestine/Palestinians available to students of this area. Iraqis are non-entities at best, irrelevant at worse, in the literature base; but Palestinians are people. Through such journals as The Journal of Palestine Studies and Arab Studies Quarterly, Arab scholars have forced the pres- ence of the Palestinians and humanized them in the literature base, and they cannot be easily overlooked or dismissed in scholarship anymore.

When the United States bombed Baghdad early on June 27, 1993, President

56 Studies in Comparative International Devdopment / Summer 1995

TABLE 8 Perspective by Subject Matter

Subject

Conflict

Israeli policy, politics, society

Public opinion

Identity

Jewish history

Zionism

Palestinian politics

Refugees

Women

Palestinian -Israeli

Religious behaviour

Arab- Israeli

Perspective

Israeli Palestinian

Foreign relations - l 1 1

Political economy 1 2 1

Total 12 11 12

None

16

Clinton commented after Sunday morning church service that he "felt good" about the strike, irrespective of civilian casualties. I don't think the Israeli Prime Minister could make a comparable public comment any more about a strike against the Palestinian people (though it was not so long ago that Shamir referred to them as roaches, and raised quite an uproar). Well, so what, one could argue. They still strike brutally. There is a qualitative difference though. Now the brutality is in the general consciousness, and needs to be defensively legitimated. Iraqis, on the other hand, die like flies, struck by Saddam's mukhabarrat, Bush's new world order, or Clinton's prescription for feeling good. There's no consciousness at all in the literature base about the brutality of any of it, or the relationship of its parts to the whole. Indeed, the dominant paradigms in the literature base, constituted of allegoric myths and metaphors, do implicitly justify it.

On the Palestine/Palestinian literature base, we have observed that it is a more substantial body of social science literature quantitatively and qualitatively. Beyond this, we can only speculate at this point in the study that, in the perspectives outlined, there is an emerging paradigm. The two perspectives that have emerged as dominant since the initiation of the intifada--the Palestinian-Israeli problem and the Israeli problem--we suspect, derive from a common paradigm. We would sketch characteristics of this paradigm to include assumptions about the uniqueness and

Ismad & Ismael 57

T A B L E 9 Subjec t M a t t e r by T ime F r a m e

Subject

Conflict

Israeli politics, policy, society

Public opinion

After the Intifada

No 1 7 28.0

7 28.0

4 16.0

%

Before the Intifada

No. %

5 14.7

2 5.9

3 8.8

4 11.8

2 5.9

7 20.6

1 2.9

1 2.9

2 5.9

3 8.8

4 11.8

34 100.0

Identity 2 8.0

Jewish history 1 4.0

Zionism 1 4.0

1 4.0

2 4.0

1

26

Palestinian politics

Refugees

Women

Foreign relations

Political economy

Religious behaviour

Total

4.0

100.0

particularistic nature of the "problem," problem parameters delineated in terms of ethnic categories, problem diagnosis focused on issues of injustice, and problem prescription focused on issues of nation-building.

References

FOUCAULT, MICHEL 1972 The archaeology of knowledge. New York: Pantheon.

KUHN, THOMAS S. 1962 The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

MARRIS, PETER 1982 Meaning and action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

SAID, EDWARD W. 1978 Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.

Studying the Arabs: Myths and metaphors

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