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The
World through Arab Eyes
Arab
Public Opinion and the Reshaping of the Middle East
by Shibley Telhami
New York: Basic Books, 2013. 240 pp. $27.99
Reviewed by David Pollock
Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2014
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A Skewed Look
at Arab Hearts and Minds
Telhami offers in The World through Arab Eyes a valuable if
unavoidably imperfect attempt at illuminating the hearts and minds of the
Arab world as revealed through public opinion polling. His book contains
useful broad generalizations, revealing new data and intriguing
ambiguities. But it also suffers from occasional problems: methodological
flaws, unsupported or questionable single-sourced assertions, and
strained interpretations that go beyond the available evidence. Arab
public opinion polling as well as the analysis and policy debate
surrounding it needs to be taken with a proverbial shaker of salt, a
seasoning the author does not always apply.
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Egyptians window
shop in Cairo. Arabs' popular dislike of the United States derives
mostly from a rejection of its policies rather than its values—and,
more surprisingly, this dislike actually has very little effect on Arab
consumer preferences or behavior.
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On the positive side, the book provides interesting and well-organized
survey data on certain broad major topics. Moreover, the author acknowledges
the evidence that Arab public opinion has turned inward, toward domestic
issues such as political freedoms and social justice. He also makes due
allowances for the significant differences among and within diverse Arab
publics.
In addition, the book offers numerous specific nuggets of information.
It is interesting and important, for instance, to see that on average the
Arab citizens of Israel are four times more likely to empathize with
Jewish Holocaust victims than are Arabs in the six other countries
polled: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Lebanon, and the United
Arab Emirates. Or that those Arabs' popular dislike of the United States
derives mostly from a rejection of its policies rather than its
values—and, more surprisingly, that this dislike actually has very little
effect on Arab consumer preferences or behavior. Another important data
point: On a weighted average, two-thirds of those in the six Arab
countries polled would accept a two-state solution to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict; only one-quarter say the Arabs should keep
fighting Israeli forever.
Equally surprising nuggets, but also plausible and useful, come from
individual countries. In Saudi Arabia, the "most admired"
foreign leader in 2011 was Saddam Hussein. In 2012 Egypt, two-thirds of
those polled wanted Shari'a as the country's legal basis, but most (83
percent) preferred applying "the spirit of shari'ah but with
adaptation to modern times"; just 17 percent opted to apply it
literally, "including the penal code (hudud)."
One problem, however, is that other recent polls show dramatically
different results for very similar questions. The latest Pew poll from
Egypt, to cite but one case, shows that 88 percent of Muslims there
favored the death penalty for apostasy.[1] This kind of discrepancy points
to the problems in most contemporary Arab survey research—whether by Pew
or Telhami.
The book suffers from scattered methodological omissions as well. The
first is simply the failure to spell out several important procedural
approaches. Were all these surveys true probability samples, or were some
based on quota or even merely "convenience" samples? If the
former, what precisely were the methods adopted in each case—multi-stage,
stratified, geographic probability? Random walk? Household interview
selection? Statistical/demographic weighting? If these were not all
standard probability samples, how truly scientific or reliable are the
resulting numbers? Regardless of sampling method, how much host
government supervision, permission, or intimidation took place, which
might have distorted the findings?
Some potentially revealing numbers are also missing from the
narrative. For example, one poll cited produced the unlikely result, not
replicated in others conducted by this reviewer, that Hugo Chavez was
once the "most admired" foreign leader among Arabs. But did he
get a rating of 60 percent, 20 percent, or some other percentage? It
makes a big difference—and in this and other instances, there is no telling
from the text.
A different deficiency is in the choice of the countries surveyed and
in the decision to stick with purely urban samples, which thereby
excludes half or more of a country's total population. Thus, the book's
samples hardly encompass all the Arab eyes of its title, and they
completely omit crucial current developments in Syria, Iraq, Libya,
Yemen, and Tunisia. Even in Egypt and other countries that are included,
many of the most salient internal political issues are absent. As a
result, the book has little to tell us about the great contest between
the Islamist and the civil-military segments of society now underway in
Egypt or about the prospects for stability or instability in Saudi
Arabia, Morocco, or Jordan.
Too often the book treats all six Arab countries polled as a unit,
which obscures rather than illuminates the vital differences among them.
The averaged responses are weighted by population. Since Egypt has many
more people than the other five countries combined, the findings are
really a distorted reflection of Egyptian public opinion rather than a
meaningful average of anything.
Another methodological problem is the occasional use of loaded
questions on key issues. Some examples: "What aspect of al-Qaeda do
you admire the most, if any?" "How important is the Palestinian
issue to you?"—instead of an open-ended question like "What issues
are important to you?" Given the author's repeated and correct
references to Arab aversion to international pressure, why ask:
"There is international pressure on Iran to curtail its nuclear
program. What is your opinion?" This preamble prejudices the
findings by cuing the respondents in a particular direction.
Finally, the author largely neglects other readily available Arab
polls that variously corroborate, qualify, or contradict the findings
from his own fieldwork. Among the obvious candidates for inclusion would
have been the Pew, Gallup, Charney, PIPA, Pechter, and many Palestinian
and Israeli surveys on the topics in question. Given the particular
constraints and vagaries of Arab polling, no single source can be
credible. In certain important cases—as on Arab attitudes toward Iran or
toward selected American values—the discrepancies among different
pollsters are so significant that they demand detailed accounting and
explanation.
In particular, other surveys taken in the two-and-a-half years since
the beginning of the 2011 Arab uprisings strongly suggest that most Arabs
are now very heavily focused on their own internal issues—and not on
Americans, Israelis, Palestinians, or other Arabs. This is contrary to
the book's overall leitmotif. Telhami interlaces the book with
observations about Arab "dignity" and "the ever-present
prism of pain," attempts to reassert the primacy of the Palestinian
issue and resentment of U.S. policy therein. If there were actual
empirical survey support for this, as opposed to mere anecdotes, fine.
But the evidence is just not there—not in the polls, not in the public
squares, and not in the actual policies of Arab governments,
revolutionary or otherwise. In 2011, as Telhami notes in passing, the
Palestinian conflict ranked eighth out of eleven possible named
priorities in an Egyptian poll—and dead last in Tunisia. Yet the author
is at pains to add that "there were other indications of [its]
importance," without indicating what those are.
Even if he at times concedes that today's Arab politics and public
opinion are "primarily" about domestic matters rather than
foreign economic, social, and political affairs, Telhami spends little
time considering the ramifications of this trend.
Telhami is among the most decent, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and
balanced experts in this all-too-polarized intellectual arena. There is
much to be learned from this book, despite its imperfections. Yet had the
author considered the substantial and directly relevant work of others
like him—including mounds of complementary but occasionally quite
contrary polling data—the result would have been considerably more
compelling. This narrow focus is a common and even an understandable
academic failing but one that is relatively easily remedied. One keeps hoping
that it will be—another time.
David Pollock is the Kaufman Senior Fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy and director of its bilingual
Arabic/English blog, Fikra Forum. A Harvard Ph.D. and former State
Department official, he is the author of Slippery Polls: Uses and
Abuses of Opinion Surveys from Arab States (Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, 2008) and The Arab Street: Public Opinion in the
Arab World (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1993).
[1] Neha Sahgal
and Brian J. Grim "Egypt's
Restrictions on Religion Coincide with Lack of Religious Tolerance,"
Pew Rresearch Center, Washington, D.C., July 2, 2013.
Related
Topics: Public opinion polls
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