Tawfic E Farah - Political Behavior in the Arab States

Political Behavior in the Arab States

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Available in hardcover and paperback.

Political Behavior in the Arab States

edited by Tawfic E. Farah

This vivid portrayal of political and social behavior in the Arab states offers new perspectives to the student and scholar of the Middle East. It also illustrates the effectiveness of survey research as an analytical tool for investigating political, social, and economic problems in Arab societies. The only book of its kinddealing in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary fashion with the political and social behavior of individuals in the Arab worldit fills a gap in the materials available for courses on the Middle East.

Dr. Farah is president of the Middle East Research Group, Inc., and editor of its publication, Journal of Arab Affairs. He was an assistant professor of political science at Kuwait University (1975-1979), a research fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles (1980-1981), and is the recipient of a Fulbright research grant for the study of political culture in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt (1983). He has been a visiting associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, every summer since 1978. He is author of Aspects of Consociationalism and Modernization: Lebanon as an Exploratory Test Case (1975) and co-author of Research Methods in the Social Sciences (1977) and the Dictionary of Social Analysis (1980).

edited by
Tawfic E. Farah

Foreword by Malcolm H. Kerr

First published 1983 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright 1983 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Political behavior in the Arab states.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Arab countriesSocial conditionsAddresses, essays, lectures. 2. Arab countries Politics and governmentAddresses, essays, lectures. 3. Political SociologyAddresses, essays, lectures. I. Farah, Tawfic.
HN766.A8P64 1983 306'.2'09174927 83-6868

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28337-7 (hbk)

It is a fair guess that very few of the courses on Middle Eastern politics taught in European and American universities devote much attention to the science of political behavior. Some teachers in the field have been trained in Middle Eastern area studies, with an emphasis on learning classical Arabic, Islamic culture, and modem political history; others come from a background in comparative political development theory or international relations. The most popular topics for field research include political ideology, parties, movements, elites, bureaucracies, revolutions, wars, and whole national systems. Not only are those the topics most in keeping with a researcher's background, but they are also the ones that can most readily be studied under the restrictive conditions of most Middle Eastern countries.

Some excellent work has come out of this tradition, and some has also been written by historians and journalists. But the missing dimensions have been those of sociology and psychology, particularly as represented in survey research. The publication of this volume edited by Professor Farah will do much to fill the gap. The book's contents serve to remind us that the conduct of political affairs in the Middle East, as elsewhere, is conditioned not onlyperhaps not even primarily by the leading public issues, ideas, and personalities of the day, but also by the primordial building blocks of human motivation such as childhood experiences, family and religious affiliations, and intercultural conflict. For us to learn more about the primordial and the ordinary in the political acculturation of people in the Arab world is to start to demythologize the distorted images of the "mysterious East" that we in Europe and America have inherited over many past generations and that color our vision of what Arab politics is really all about.

Not surprisingly, many of the articles reproduced in this volume are not by political scientists but by sociologists and psychologists, and in many cases the subjects of the articles are only related to politics in a general or indirect way. This is as it should be if we consider the explicitly political level of the life of a society as a superstructure resting on unseen foundations of the individual needs, emotions, and experiences of masses of people. It is also noteworthy that of the articles specifically reporting research within a single country, many are about Lebanon and the others are scattered widely among other countries. Among those missing altogether are Algeria, Iraq, Syria, and the two Yemens, all of them countries of great potential interest but where field research is hard to come by.

Admittedly this situation could have been somewhat different, for there do exist scholars working in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and elsewhere whose work is not included in the volume. But the fa ct remains that, on the whole, social psychology and survey research are still largely the preserves of researchers trained in or affiliated with U. S. and British universities. In the Arab world they are concentrated in a few locales of Anglo-American culture influence, such as the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo. It is also a sad truth that when it comes to survey research on subjects with a clear political relevance, Lebanon has been almost alone in the Arab world in offering full hospitality to foreign or domestic scholars.