ABSTRACT
Arab culture, the dominant culture of the central Middle East and the founding culture of Islam, is both a brilliant construction of human creativity and a practical response to many human problems. Arab culture addresses the universal problem of order and security in an ingenious and time-tested fashion. Arab culture in the central Middle East is characterized by a particular form of social control which has a major impact on human experience and social life. Postcolonial theory does more than comment on the Arab Middle East, it has adopted the Arab spirit of balanced opposition. The postcolonial argument that knowledge of other cultures is impossible, because people and cultures do not exhibit uniformity, jumps from a known fact to a false inference. Postcolonial theory is not part of the solution to Middle Eastern problems; rather, it is part of the problem.
