Deadly dysfunctional Muslim culture, past, present, future, and why democracy and modernization fail

 Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, argues the failure of Arabs was due to their rigid cultural mindset based on "primordial loyalties" to kin, clan and religion, and self-assertion with rhetoric while blaming others for every problem with rage. He wrote,

An Arab journalist friend explained, “Arabs are always angry. They always look for the bad and then harp on it.”

mental rigidity on the Arab street

Arab peoples tend to place too much trust in “institutions rooted in primordial loyalties, notably kinship, clanism and religion.” [United Nations Arab Human Development Report, 2009] 

Bernard Lewis, the renowned Princeton scholar of Islam, has called attention to the Arab tendency to play “the blame game.”

He notes Arabs traditionally blamed the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks, the colonial powers, and now the Jews and the Americans for everything that has gone awry 

Arabs indulge in rage and rhetoric

a cultural mind-set that helps explain why the US effort to democratize, reshape, and modernize the Arab Middle East by occupying and nation-building in Iraq faltered miserably.

cultural schizophrenia he [Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri] described as “a strange combination of self-assertion and reliance on foreign actors.”

Arabs are their own worst enemy – and that until this changes, little else will change.

 Although Rodgers was analyzing the Arabs in his article, the problems discussed can be found among Muslims in general, regardless of race or ethnicity.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Related story: (Bad) Muslim psychology: The blame game