Arab Intellectual Discourse

I am reading lots of analysis of Arab intellectual production of the 20th Century, which is mostly written and published in the West and focuses on the effect of colonialism on the Arab intellectuals. Said set the pattern with his Orientalism book and has created a veritable school of thought. What is shocking for me is the poverty of the documents on which this structure is built: The number of non-trivial books (that is, not children's illustrated stories or religious tractates or porn) are few, there is almost no intellectual discourse that can be analyzed, the journals consist in one or two pages with no controversies nor real content. The overall production of the Arab world, almost one thousand million human beings, is negligible. Contrast that with the copious production of Israel, full of controversies, rivalries, intellectual fights, thousands of original books published every year, hundreds of political films - most of it damning Israel and its "colonialism". There are more serious representations of Arabs in Israeli Jewish films than in all the childish stories of Arab TV and filmography. In extremis, compare Arab production with the explosive boiling over of Nigerian literature and filmography, which may be less abstract than German philosophical tractates and shockingly "vulgar", but impress the observer as a tropical explosion of color, libido and elan vital.

My point is that Western analysis of Arab intellectual discourse is more voluminous than the production itself. The West is trying to attribute intellectual thought to the Arab umma where there is none.

One reason for the wasteland that is the Arab production is that they live in harsh dictatorships, where original bloggers are jailed and journalists live in fear of writing a controversial word. They keep repeating the infantile formula of colonialist oppression because wrongly, they feel it flatters them and know that blaming the short episode of Western colonialism (say sixty years, from 1890 to 1945) they will have no issues with their own governments and they will enjoy the applause of Western universities.