The divided mind in the Arab world

By Khaled Salih

Introduction

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Bernard Lewis’s poignant question, “What went wrong?” articulated a profound anxiety about the Middle East’s trajectory from a pinnacle of intellectual and geopolitical influence to a state of dysfunction, stagnation, and extremism. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, in his essay “The Enchantment of the Arab Mind,”[Mansour 202507] offers a radical reinterpretation of this decline, arguing that the problem was not a retreat into religious tradition, but an “intellectual and philosophical crisis, directly tied to the university,” stemming from an “over-eager Arab Muslim adoption of Western ideas and institutions” [Tikvah 20250731, at 23:12 ]. This article offers a compelling, indeed a missing link, neuro-cognitive framework from Iain McGilchrist’s bi-hemispheric model of the brain, which posits two fundamentally opposed modes of experience. By integrating Mansour’s meticulous intellectual history with McGilchrist’s insights into hemispheric function, a new, deeply illuminating approach emerges for understanding not only the Arab world’s predicament but also the broader human susceptibility to ideological capture and cultural distortion.

In discussions, the Arab world, the Muslim world and the Middle East are used interchangeably. In this text, I will do the same, but as the title of Mansour’s article spells it out, it is more about the Arab mind. In much of the debate on colonialism, occupation, and imperialism, intellectuals, politicians, academics, journalists and everyday people use these terms only in relation to the Western version of these concepts and historical events. You rarely hear Arab, Muslim, Iranian, Turkish comments as to why there is an Arab or a Muslim world, and if these two worlds have anything to do with colonialism, imperialism, occupation or usurpation of other people’s land, identity, history or sense of belonging. Or as Howard Bloom observed:

“Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Adolf Hitler tried to take over the world. All of them failed. Yet … [Muslims] hammered together an empire eleven times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman Empire, and seven times the size of the United States. The biggest empire in history.” [Bloom 2016]

That neglected issue will not be addressed here.

Mansour argues that the Arab world’s current struggles stem from a “rapid modernisation that went terribly wrong,” leading to a “nihilistic legacy” born from the adoption of “West’s most dangerous ideas.” The author identifies key contributing factors, including the importation of German idealism, which reconfigured Arab identity, the rise of a postmodern Islamism, and the transformation of the Palestinian movement into a “symbolic axis” for revolutionary meaning, fostering a “theology of national martyrdom” that “sanctified vengeance as spiritual rebirth.” This article then introduces Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s concept of “Left Hemisphere Capture” to explain this crisis, where the brain’s analytical, mechanistic left hemisphere dominates the holistic, empathetic right hemisphere. This imbalance, mirrored in Western pathologies, results in a fragmented, decontextualised world, leading to a “collapse of meaning” and an “intellectual decadence,” according to McGilchrist’s framework, lies in reasserting the primacy of the right hemisphere to foster a more nuanced, interconnected, and embodied understanding of reality, moving beyond simplistic, nihilistic interpretations.

The Arab world

According to Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, the issues plaguing the Arab world and the Middle East are multifaceted and stem from a rapid modernisation that went terribly wrong. This crisis is not merely one of decline or stagnation, but rather a consequence of the widespread adoption of some of the West’s most dangerous ideas, leading to a nihilistic legacy [Mansour 202507].

Mansour’s take on the issues

Mansour outlines several key elements contributing to this predicament.

Importing European thought

The crisis began in European universities, where a specific vision of history, particularly German idealism, came to reconfigure Arab identity, purpose, and symbolic life from within. This introduced post-Enlightenment and post-religious humanist narratives that eventually decomposed, leaving behind only fragments of identity built on symbolic rage [Mansour 202507].

The Palestinian movement as a symbolic axis

The Palestinian movement emerged as the supposed intersection of Zionism, imperialism, and global injustice, becoming the “symbolic axis around which revolutionary meaning could be organised; a theology of national martyrdom.” For the Western and non-Arab Left, it offered a “moral mirror,” secularising violence and turning hatred into a means of “universal redemption.” This ideological framework, rather than the quran or hadith, became the “structure of conviction” for Arab radicals in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Palestinian movement emerged as more than just an anti-colonial cause; it became understood by the Arab New Left, and much of the global New Left, as the moral center of the world. For Arabs, as Palestine transformed into the symbolic axis around which revolutionary meaning could be organised, a theology of martyrdom became the order of the day. [Mansour 202507]

Sanctification of violence

European radical texts, especially Frantz Fanon’s “worship of violence,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s “militant nihilism,” and Régis Debray’s romantic “portrayal of South American revolutionary brutality,” deeply “saturated Arab intellectual life.” These ideas were embraced as a “new moral order,” transforming “violence into sacrament and struggle into salvation.” The influence of Frantz Fanon, especially as interpreted by Jean-Paul Sartre, was decisive, sanctifying vengeance as spiritual rebirth and giving license to a generation to view brutality as a form of truth. [Mansour 202507]

Shift towards authenticity (asala)

“Radical chic” became a must. Mansour argues that “radical chic, not Islamic jurisprudence, that was instructing underfed, semi-literate Palestinian boys in the rituals of martyrdom and sacrifice.” The tragedy is that this was “mistaken for authenticity” and hailed as “the acme of moral righteousness” in universities globally [Mansour 202507]

After the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Arab intellectuals turned away from history (influenced by Hegel and Marx) in order to dig and find Arab/Muslim asala, or rooted authenticity, inspired by Martin Heidegger’s fixation on authenticity, rootedness, and belonging to a forgotten origin. This was not a substantive return to Islamic tradition, but an embrace of Islam as constructed by revolutionary regimes, mirroring the shift to identity politics in America.

Shared conceptual idiom with the West

Mansour suggests that Bernard Lewis, in his inquiry “What went wrong?,” misunderstood the Arab predicament by understanding it “all too easily.” Both Lewis and the Arab radicals he studied spoke a “mutually intelligible language,” not Arabic or English, but the conceptual idiom of modern historicism. They interpreted crisis, decline, reform, and revolution through the same categories. [Mansour 202507]

A mirror for Western pathologies

Crucially, Mansour argues that the Arab crisis is a mirror for the West’s own pathologies, “what went wrong there might also be going wrong in the West.” The collapse of meaning, cult of authenticity, and obsession with anti-Semitic annihilation seen in Arab intellectual life are a “condensation of a global crisis.” The West, too, has moved from truth to narrative, history to trauma, politics to identity, and into nihilism, with its moral vocabulary drifting into incoherence and public rituals deteriorating into spectacles. Western radicals cheering on groups like Hamas share something in common with these Arab pathologies.

Intellectual decadence

The modern Arab intellectual, like their Western counterpart, is no longer a prophet or builder, but a concierge of decadence, curating the archives of dead ideas, polishing the slogans of vanished revolutions, and sweeping the dust of meaning.

A McGilchristinian take

The divided brain and Left Hemisphere Capture

Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain posits that the two cerebral hemispheres, though interconnected, offer “two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of experience” [McGilchrist 2019, p. 3]. The critical distinction is not what each hemisphere does, but “how it does it that matters” [McGilchrist 2019, p. x]. This difference in manner gives rise to distinct “takes” or “dispositions” towards the world. McGilchrist’s concept of “Left Hemisphere Capture,” where the left hemisphere (LH), acting as an Emissary, usurps the role of the right hemisphere (RH), the Master, provides a powerful lens through which to understand Mansour’s analysis [McGilchrist 2019, p. xxiv, 6, 205, 230].

The what and how of the hemispheres

The left hemisphere (LH)

The LH is primarily concerned with manipulation of the world [McGilchrist 2021]. It deals with detail, the local, what is central and in the foreground, and what is easily grasped. It prefers familiar information. It reduces reality to “self-contained units” and an “abstract frame of reference,” leading to a loss of context [McGilchrist 2019, p. 430]. Its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all, offers mechanistic models to explain everything, and tends to deny discrepancies that do not fit its existing schema. It is prone to jump to conclusions [McGilchrist 2019, p. xii, McGilchrist 2021]. The LH’s world is described as “explicit,” “mechanical, lifeless,” a “virtual, bloodless affair,” and a “map” that threatens to replace reality [McGilchrist 2019, p. 200, 209]. It is characterized by “unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness” [McGilchrist 2019, p. 6]. It suffers from “ignorance of ignorance,” believing itself to be the “real Master” and “overconfident it is right,” even when producing “plausible, but bogus, explanations” [McGilchrist 2021].

The right hemisphere (RH)

The RH, the Master, is concerned with understanding the world as a whole and how to relate to it [McGilchrist 2021]. It deals with novel information [McGilchrist_2019, page 482 (Note 10). It presents an array of possible solutions, is actively watching for discrepancies, and acts “more like a devil’s advocate” [McGilchrist_2019, p. 41]. It underwrites intuition, imagination, empathy, music, metaphoric and symbolic understanding, and religious sense [McGilchrist_2019, p. 206]. Its world is one of “individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world,” never fully graspable, always imperfectly known, and to this world, it exists in a “relationship of care” [McGilchrist_2019, p. 153, 174]. The RH is “more reliable” and tends to be “hesitant, tentative and flexible”. It is also the one that knows what it doesn’t know [McGilchrist 2021].

The why of Left Hemisphere Capture in the Arab world

Mansour’s observation of the “rapid modernisation that went terribly wrong” and the adoption of “West’s most dangerous ideas” [Mansour 202507] can be seen as the consequence of a societal Left Hemisphere Capture. The West, according to McGilchrist, has itself been increasingly dominated by the LH’s worldview, leading to a mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world.

The “post-Enlightenment” hatred and decomposition of “grand, post-religious, humanist narratives” [Mansour 202507] directly reflects McGilchrist’s argument that the Enlightenment saw a significant shift towards LH dominance, which struggles with holistic meaning and context. When meaning collapses, the LH, focused on control and manipulation, might fill the void with “symbolic rage” and a “theology of national martyrdom” that sacralises violence [Mansour 202507]. The LH, being “unemotional” but capable of anger and denial [McGilchrist 2019, p. xii], might rationalise such destructive impulses as “redemptive universal victimhood” [Mansour 202507].

The turn towards asala (rooted authenticity) could be interpreted as a genuine (RH-driven) longing for rootedness, which is an RH quality. However, Mansour notes it was “Islam as constructed by the revolutionary regimes” and similar to “identity politics”. This “construction” and “purified self” suggest the LH’s attempt to define, systematise, and manipulate authenticity rather than authentically be it. The LH, with its focus on “what it itself has made” and “well-worn familiarity, certainty and finitude” [McGilchrist 2019, p. 83], would prefer a “constructed” version of tradition over its living, evolving essence.

The “conceptual idiom of modern historicism” [Mansour 202507] shared by Lewis and Arab intellectuals aligns with the LH’s “system building” and rhetorical power, which tends to “create something very different from the whole that has been lost” [McGilchrist 2019, p. 201]. This abstract, decontextualised approach, characteristic of the LH [McGilchrist 2021], explains why discussions about crisis and reform remain within a framework that prevents a true understanding of the underlying issues.

The mirroring of Arab pathologies in the West underscores McGilchrist’s thesis that the “Arab tragedy plays out, in heightened form, the same collapse of inner structure and restraint” that is reverberating through the entire Western world [Mansour 202507]. This is the consequence of LH dominance, leading to a world “curiously stripped of depth, colour and value” [McGilchrist 2019, p. xxvi].

Rethinking based on McGilchrist’s analysis

McGilchrist’s work offers a clear path towards redressing the balance, which could be applied to the Arab world’s predicaments.

Rebalance the hemispheres

The fundamental rethinking would be to reassert the primacy of the right hemisphere, allowing it to regain its role as Master to the left hemisphere’s “servant”. The LH is an “invaluable" tool for division and systematic thought, crucial for civilisation, but it is a “wonderful servant, but a very poor master”. Its contributions need to be “returned to the realm of the right hemisphere, where it can once again live” [McGilchrist 2019, p. 227].

Cultivate an RH mode of attention

The Arab world needs to “learn again to look, to see,” by redirecting attention to “what-out-there-is-not-us” [McGilchrist 2021]. This means moving away from the LH’s narrowly focused, utilitarian attention towards the RH’s broad, vigilant, unprejudiced attention, which is concerned with “care” for the world. This would allow a deeper understanding of reality, rather than a mere manipulation of its parts.

Embrace nuance, paradox, and ambiguity

The LH’s “either/or” thinking and its demand for consistency often lead to paradoxes when applied to the messy reality (e.g., the Cretan liar paradox) [McGilchrist 2019, p. 139]. The RH, however, understands that truth is complex, multi-layered, and inherently ambiguous. A healthier intellectual life would embrace the coherence that emerges from apparent inconsistencies, rather than seeking simplistic, atomistic solutions.

Integrate science, season, intuition, and imagination

McGilchrist argues that there are four main pathways to truth: science, reason, intuition, and imagination. A world view that fails to pay due respect to all four is “bound to fail” [McGilchrist 2019, p. xxvi]. The Arab world, having suffered from a nihilistic legacy of decomposed humanist narratives, needs to reintegrate intuition and imagination with reason and science. This means using the LH’s analytical power in service of the RH’s holistic understanding, recognising that creative insight often arises from the right hemisphere and cannot be forced by purely logical procedures.

Re-embody understanding and experience

The LH’s world is “disembodied” and “lifeless” [McGilchrist 2019]. Mansour’s description of the Arab intellectual as a concierge of decadence reflects a loss of living meaning. Tradeoffs must involve a return to the “lived body" and the understanding that consciousness and the world are profoundly interrelated. This entails grounding intellectual pursuits in embodied experience and community practices, traditions, and rituals.

Overcome “ignorance of ignorance”

The LH’s overconfidence and its tendency to deny what it doesn’t know must be recognised and counteracted. A healthy approach requires the hesitancy, tentativeness, and flexibility of the right hemisphere, fostering humility and an openness to uncertainty. This means moving beyond “scientism” and acknowledging the limits of purely rational, mechanistic models.

Foster true interconnectedness and contextual awareness

The LH breaks down reality into “self-contained units” and leads to a “loss of context.” The RH, by contrast, perceives the world as an interconnected web of relationships. For the Arab world to move beyond “fragments of identity” and nihilism, there must be a shift towards understanding identity and purpose within a rich, living context, rather than through decontextualised analysis or abstract political theories.

By applying McGilchrist’s framework, the Arab world’s “crisis” can be re-understood not just as a cultural or political failure, but as a consequence of a fundamental imbalance in the modes of attending to and understanding reality, a state mirroring deeper issues even in the Western world itself. The tradeoffs lie in a conscious effort to rebalance these modes, allowing the right hemisphere’s wisdom and holistic perspective to guide the left hemisphere’s analytical and manipulative capabilities towards a richer, more authentic, and less nihilistic future.

References

Howard Bloom 2016, The Muhammad Code. How a Desert Prophet Brought You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram Or How Muhammad Invented Jihad. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour 202507, “The Enchantment of the Arab Mind,” https://ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/essays/the-enchantment-of-the-arab-mind?welcome=mosaic

Iain McGilchrist, 2019, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Revised Edition). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Iain McGilchrist, 2021, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspectiva Press. (Two volumes)

Tikvah 20250731, “How Islamism Took Over the Middle East. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, Ze’ev Maghen, & Bernard Haykel,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlNQsL75jRo&t=861s

See also by Khaled Salih

20250809, “Devshirme: The Bureaucracy of Child Enslavement,” https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/devshirme-the-bureaucracy-of-chil

202050731, “Caliphate Slavery,” https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/caliphate-slavery

202050728, “En personlig läsning av Iain McGilchrists Mästaren och hans budbärare,” https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/en-personlig-lasning-av-iain-mcgilchrists

202050724, “Lost in the Left: How Hamas Ruined Gaza and the Palestinian Cause,” https://khaledsalih.substack.com/p/lost-in-the-left-how-hamas-ruined