Rating: 
Summary: You did not have Zero star
Review: This is a racist book probably because his author is a Jew that hates Arabs.
Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive and accurate collective portrait
Review: This is in my judgment a comprehensive and accurate portrait of the 'Arab Mind'. It is written with a clear affection for the Arab world and by one who had many good Arab friends. It helps explain much behavior which those of us who came to the Middle East in our adult years found puzzling.
One major example of this concerns the Arab relation to ' truth' The Arabs according to Patai do not have a concept of objective truth in the way Westerners do. The Arabs in general tell people what they believe others want to hear. This makes them excellent propagandists. They also themselves tend to live very much in a world of wishful thinking. Thus Arabs have difficulty taking responsibility for their own faults , and in general tend to look to blame others. For instance the whole story of their failure in modernization is told by them as the responsibility of the colonial imperial West. This is the line by the way taken in the academy even today by Arab apologists, most notably the late Edward Said. Patai shows how the flight from responsibility also has its damaging effect on Arab political life. He shows too how the endless conflicts within and between Arabs are inherent in the familial relations in the society.
Patai has many positive things to say about Arab values such as hospitality, generosity to guests, family concern. But above all his book explains to the reader why the Arab world today constitutes such a great problem to itself and to others.
The lack of tolerance for the beliefs of others, the inability to honestly criticize themselves , the male chauvinism and repression of female abilities all lead to the backwardness. And from the backwardness comes too those abhorrent forms of violence which unfortunately seem to be ( not as Patai hoped in 1983 when he wrote the book , diminishing) but rather increasing.
Rating:
Summary: A Neocon Bible?
Review: Whatever the academic merits of "The Arab Mind," it appears to have been one of the sources of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh writes in the May 24, 2004 edition of "The New Yorker": "The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged-"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."" The rating is a reflection of the book's potential historical importance.
Rating:
Summary: The best classic on Arabs
Review: When you read this book, you'll become interested in sociology as an interesting branch of human sciences. Patai is a genius. His book is by far the best in this respect.
For Arab readers: Read the book and in no time you'll find yourselves putting names to the abundant examples Patai cites.
The book deals with several interesting traits that most Arabs share in their inherent characters. These include the Arab unawareness of time, their tendency to speak more than they can actually deliver, their fixation with sex and their keenness to preserve Bedouin values which include preserving a group's honor by preserving the chastity of its female members.
Even though the book is academic, the style is entertaining as it alternates between theories and real life examples to illustrate them.
The book, a classic, is certainly worth a read. Try it!
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