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24 Inside the Arab Mind!

est of everything he has, and as much as that person can humanly hold. And just as Lot, in Genesis
19:1-3, insisted that the two travelers stay in his house for the night, so, also, will the modern Arab
pressure a stranger to remain under his roof and partake of his hospitality. The customs of hospital-
ity and generosity have changed little in 4,000 years, nor have the customs of raiding (thieving, rus-
tling), saving face or savagery.

For the ancient Bedouin, raiding neighboring tribes and villages was a favorite pastime as
well as an economic necessity. It was practically the only way they could improve their situation or
standard of living. Raiding your enemy, your neighbor and even your own brother was considered
to be “one of the few manly occupations” (Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind, p. 81). Today’s farmers,
living in the regions of Israel where Bedouin Arabs abound, complain of losing tractors, imple-
ments, equipment, livestock, fertilizers, fencing, etc. to their neighbors. And when, because of a
rash of murders of Israeli citizens, the Israeli government closed off the administered territories and
refused entry to some 100,000 Arab workers from the West Bank and Gaza in 1993, Israeli police
reported a 30% drop in car and house thefts. These workers constituted a small percentage of the 5.5
million people in the land, yet they were responsible for nearly one-third of the nation’s car thefts
and house burglaries! Some 650,000 Arabs hold Israeli citizenship and live in Israel proper; the
reader can thus imagine what percentage of car thefts and burglaries that number is probably re-
sponsible for!

“Face”

The terms, “saving face,” and “loss of face,” are Western terms that describe prominent
characteristics endemic to the Eastern world. The Arab either “whitens” the face (saves face), or
“blackens” the face (loses face). “Face is the outward appearance of honor, the ‘front’ of honor
which a man will strive to preserve even if, in actuality, he has committed a dishonorable act” (ibid.,
p. 101). In the Arab world “honor” and “face” are so closely related that the words are almost inter-
changeable. This “face,” or “honor,” is such an integral part of the Arab mind that a person is con-
sidered perfectly justified in resorting to deceit and falseness in order to “whiten,” or save, their
own, someone else’s or the entire Arab world’s face. The Arab mind is in perpetual motion -- work-
ing against “blackening” the face (losing face), and thus sculptures its words accordingly. When it
comes to “whitening” or saving somebody else’s face or the face of the Arab world, lying is even
considered to be “a duty” (ibid., p. 105).

Arab lying, like Arab hospitality, generosity and raiding, is an echo from the past, as made
clear by an early Islamic theologian: “We must lie when truth leads to unpleasant results”
(al-Ghazali, quoted in Laffin, The Arab Mind, p. 79). “It is sometimes a duty to lie” (ibid.). “If a lie
is the only way to reach a good result, it is allowable” (ibid.). And a medieval Syrian poet also
wrote: “I lift my voice to utter lies absurd, for when I speak the truth, my hushed tones scarce are
heard” (Abu l’Ala 973-1057, quoted in ibid., p. 50). Lying, therefore, has been a normal, integral,
prevalent and perfectly acceptable facet of Arab culture since time immemorial. And until the West,
its leaders and its politicians understand the full implications of this reflex action of the Arab mind
when dealing with members of the Arab world, they can never hope to arrive at the results they aim
for. So often one reads statements made by prominent politicians to the effect that it is not what is
said by Arab leaders in Arabic that counts, but what they say publicly in English. Such statements
are not only naive, but also completely absurd. When push comes to shove, it is only what is said in

The Berean Voice November-December 2002