When in the Arab World

An Insider's Guide to Living and Working with Arab Culture

By: Rana Nejem

Narrated by: Rana F. Nejem

Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

This book is a practical map that will help you understand the people and demystify the culture of the Arab world - the beliefs, values and social structures that determine how business is conducted and how things are done. This is not a sterile list of dos and don'ts. This book will help you develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of the motivators of behavior. It will also widen your perspective and arm you with the knowledge that will enable you to float with ease and confidence from one situation to the other.

©2018 Rana Nejem (P)2020 Rana Nejem

Misleading

The author puts great effort into the introduction trying to establish herself as a non biased and open minded writer. That is part of the reason I was interested. I started listening and quickly discovered that she had merely created a facade and her writings are in fact biased and leaned very much one way disguised by an attempt to sound objective. IMHO anyone with real world “outsider” experiences that lived in some of these places for years and had great relations making many Arab and middle Eastern friends would be able to call this for what it is. A poorly disguised biased view of the Arab world and many of the regions surrounding. I have yet to meet a nation or civilization or even tribe that is without committing terrible atrocities at some point. I would rate this as a geopolitically driven op-ed piece hailing her preferential governments as innocent victims and the rest of the world as evil people.

A bloated example of ignorance & bigotry

Having recently moved to Jordan, but with an already established background in the region's history, language and culture; I was still looking forward to this book and what more it could teach me. Unfortunately, all it showed me was that the author is a horrible writer and a worse person.

First of all, she has pumped up this book to a very bloated 6 hours and 40 minutes with numerous anecdotes from "friends and contributors" who either repetitively speak "glowingly" of the Arab world and their experiences or lecture the reader about how to behave and think amongst Arabs.

This is not a problem in itself, but In many instances, this makes up the majority of a chapter's contents. She spends as much time with these anecdotes (probably more) as she does with teaching the reader anything about MENA culture or history or business.

I did not buy this book to read about OTHER travelers anecdotes nor THEIR advice for how i should handle myself in Arab contexts. I bought the book for the "insider's" expertise that the author was supposed to provide.

The most egregious of this author's actions are alluded to in another reviewers comments (Shelley 02/23). She is preying upon trendy Western shame in this new gilded/"guilted" age. The author is NOT an unbiased person seeking to enlighten or educate, she is a person who is pushing a narrative and seeking to indoctrinate and excuse the actions of her governments and her people.

First, the author ascribes to the new rewriting of history that is being attempted by those amongst the Arab "intelligentsia" to paint themselves as the innocent sheep herders & traders who were simply minding their own business when those bloodthirsty Israelis came out of nowhere and brought the Nakba, i.e. time of suffering or "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians, the latter being her words.

This attemp to equate the time of the Nakba (withdrawal of Palestinians in advance of the invading Arab-muslim armies and, for some, the loss of their homes) to the Jewish Holocaust is disgusting and bigotry at it's most foul.

In addition, she glosses over and lies about what happened to Jews throughout the MENA region post-1948 & '67. Sephardic Jews were attacked and forced out throughout the region (as can be found in other objective history books here on Audible), especially after 1967 (she claims they simply migrated elsewhere).

Another inexplicable lie, from one of her "anecdotal contributors", was that Japan is a land without religion upon comparing it to the Islamic region. Oddly, it came from a Japanese contributor, which causes me to question whether or not her contributors are real or she is pulling things out of thin air based upon her own ignorance and bigotry of Japan and it's culture.

I stopped and started this book many times over a six month period. (It's not even 7 hours long?!?) Equally frustrated at times with how boring or uninformative or just outright wrong with facts?!? I ashamedly even slogged on past her historical lies about Israel looking for some nuggets of useful information, but when even some of the cultural info regarding Arabs or Muslims seemed to be faulty or unreliable (as i later discovered), i honestly grew to hate the sound of her voice because i had no respect for her and couldn't bring myself to finish the last ¼ of the book.

This book deserves zero stars. It contributes nothing to the world except bigotry and ignorance.