Cultural DNA: The Psychology of Globalization

Chapter 4The Middle East: Ambivalence and Uncertainty in the Modern Age

If most external observers with limited experience of the Middle East were prompted to apply a psychological lens to the region, they would likely come up with perspectives formed through knowledge of recent global events or the image of Islam as a religion. Western observers, in particular, if asked for their authentic rather than politically correct observations, would in all likelihood produce a generally negatively tinged list: intellectual and emotional rigidity, intolerance of different value systems, excessive emotionality, propensity for empty posturing, and underlying hostility to the outside world. Worrying stories of seemingly sophisticated and well-educated young, middle-class men transforming overnight into Jihadists, or the rise out of nowhere of groups such as ISIL, all add to a sense of a world in which psychologically regressive, unpredictable, and potentially troublesome themes are at play.

However, if you were a time traveler and could go back a few hundred years, your views might be very different. Between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries the Muslim world was at the center of a vast global commercial hub with deep trading connections to China, India, Africa, and Europe. Only the New World was outside of this trading and commercial Pax Islamica, renowned for its openness, tolerance, and receptivity to learning from other cultures. The Muslim world at that point was far ahead of Europe ...