The World Through Arab Eyes
Arab Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Once a voiceless region dominated by authoritarian rulers, the Arab world seems to have developed an identity of its own almost overnight. The series of uprisings that began in 2010 profoundly altered politics in the region, forcing many experts to drastically revise their understandings of the Arab people. Yet while the Arab uprisings have indeed triggered seismic changes, Arab public opinion has been a perennial but long ignored force influencing events in the Middle East.
In The World Through Arab Eyes, eminent political scientist Shibley Telhami draws upon a decade's worth of original polling data, probing the depths of the Arab psyche to analyze the driving forces and emotions of the Arab uprisings and the next phase of Arab politics. With great insight into the people and countries he has surveyed, Telhami provides a longitudinal account of Arab identity, revealing how Arabs' present-day priorities and grievances have been gestating for decades. The demand for dignity foremost in the chants of millions went far beyond a straightforward struggle for food and individual rights. The Arabs' cries were not simply a response to corrupt leaders, but were in fact inseparable from the collective respect they crave from the outside world. Decades of perceived humiliations at the hands of the West have left many Arabs with a wounded sense of national pride, but also a desire for political systems with elements of Western democracies -- an apparent contradiction that is only one of many complicating our understanding of the monumental shifts in Arab politics and society.
In astonishing detail and with great humanity, Telhami identifies the key prisms through which Arabs view issues central to their everyday lives, from democracy to religion to foreign relations with Iran, Israel, the United States, and other world powers. The World Through Arab Eyes reveals the hearts and minds of a people often misunderstood but ever more central to our globalized world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Resentment of America and Israel is the "prism" that shapes Arab perspectives, according to this finely calibrated study of public opinion in the Middle East. University of Maryland political scientist Telhami (The Stakes: America in the Middle East) analyzes decades of his own polling data in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, supplemented by polls of Israeli Arabs and Jews and of Americans, to probe evolving views about the international scene and domestic politics and society. His survey partly confirms and complicates conventional views of Arab opinion. He finds, unsurprisingly, an overwhelmingly negative view of Israel and the United States, one that is energized by a preoccupation with public dignity and a "hunger for Arab power." But that antipathy, he contends, is based on policy rather than clashing values: most Arabs, he contends, like American pop culture, support women working outside the home, and favor democracy. Telhami weaves mountains of data into a lucid, thoughtful account of shifting attitudes, one that registers the impact of the Internet and Al Jazeera in changing attitudes and the growing influence public attitudes exert over government policy, especially since the Arab Spring. The result is an unusually rich portrait of the Arab worldview.
