The Intellectual, Cultural and Social Identity of the Contemporary Arab World

Understanding the intellectual and cultural identity of Arab societies can be a prerequisite for studies in the Arab world. The Arab world, with its diverse geographic and national and demographic diversity, has a strong identity and solidarity. In the intellectual and cultural field, components such as the creation of Arabic intellectual processes in the context of interacting with modernity and with the mission of responding to backwardness, the successive failure of thoughts and corrective plans and the subsequent birth of the schools of modernity, the tendency of moderation to extremes, the dominant facets of religious understanding, the weakness of philosophy, the poverty of the components and cogs of civilization, are the most common intellectual and cultural commonalities of Arab societies.In the social and political spheres, the wandering between the caliphate and democracy, military defeats and numerous historical humiliations, colonialism and exploitation in the old and new forms, the potent potential of violence, anti-Shi’ism and Iranophobia which is a dormant ideal that is now flammable , Intellectual and cultural interdependence, and social and political fate, blowing in the atmosphere of inflammation and bipolarity, insisting on divergence, especially in dealing with Iran, the tribal political system and tribal social fabric and the strong pull of nationalism are most effective commonalities of Arab societies which can be understood from them.This paper reports on the common mental and cultural coordinates of contemporary Arab societies and some of its broad social indicators. The paper is structured in two parts: the first part reviews the intellectual and cultural identity of Arab societies, and the second part, the social identity.