After decades spent trying to explain the Arab world to Americans, all too often I have found myself running up against the same myths and half-truths that, year after year, stubbornly maintain an alarming ability to shape thinking about the region.
One of the reasons I wrote my recently published book Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters was to challenge these myths head on. Unlike so many other books or articles that have been written about the region, Arab Voices is neither a retelling nor an interpretation of history, and not a collection of personal anecdotes. These approaches can be useful, and there are excellent examples that have made real contributions to our understanding.
But they are also susceptible to bias or sloppy social science - as in the case of writers with a penchant for elevating an observation or a conversation into a generalised conclusion (the musings of Tom Friedman come to mind).
My starting point has been hard data, derived from more than a decade of polling that Zogby International, run by my brother John, has conducted across the Middle East. Where I use personal anecdotes, it is to put flesh on the basic structure described by the numbers. By combining both methods, we can help to tell the stories of those Arabs whose realities we must understand.
And a clear-eyed view is important because for too long understandings of this region and peoples have been clouded by distorted stereotypes and myths. They have dominated people's thinking and, in some cases, have shaped government policies.
There are five fundamental myths that I examine in my recent book, contrasting the misperceptions they are grounded in with the data that reveals what Arabs really think.
The first question is whether Arabs are all the same and can be reduced to a "type"? You might think so if you only read the broad generalisations and crude caricatures of Arabs, found for example in Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind (which was used as a training manual by the US military in Iraq) or Tom Friedman's column Mideast Rules to Live By in The New York Times.
But our polling reveals a very different view. There is a varied landscape across the Arab world that defies stereotype. Not only are there diverse sub-cultures and unique histories that give texture to life, making Egyptians different from Saudis or Lebanese, there are also generational differences. For example, younger Arabs (who are 60 per cent of the population of this region) are caught up with globalisation and change.
A second myth is that Arabs are so diverse that they do not constitute a "world" at all? That's what The Economist would have us believe. In a special 2009 issue, the magazine described the region as "a big amorphous thing and arguably not a thing at all". Once again, polling reveals quite the opposite. Across the region, Arabs do identify as "Arabs" and describe themselves as tied to one another by a common language and shared political concerns.
A third, pernicious myth is that Arabs are all angry, hating western values and way of life. In a recent poll, we found this view to be shared by a plurality of Americans. But our work in the Arab world finds quite the opposite to be true; Arabs like the American people, and they not only respect western education and advances in science and technology, but also the values of freedom and democracy. What Arabs don't like is US foreign policy towards them. As one Arab businessman told me: "We feel like jilted lovers."
Fourthly, are Arabs driven by religious fanaticism? Arabs are, like many in the West, "people of faith", with their values shaped by their religious traditions. But mosque attendance across the Middle East is about the same as church attendance rates in the US. And when we ask Arabs what programmes they prefer to watch on TV, the list is as varied as those favoured by US viewers. Religious programmes are near the bottom of the list. Arabs list their most important concerns, not surprisingly, as the quality of their work and their families.
Lastly there is the myth that Arabs reject reform and will not change unless the West pushes them. This has been a fundamental tenet of the neo-conservatives. Derived from the writings of Bernard Lewis, this myth provided one of the rationales for the Iraq war - the idea being that the US would destroy the "old regime" to establish a "new Middle East".
What polling shows, however, is that Arabs want reform, but the reform they want is theirs, not the West's. Their top domestic priorities are better jobs, improved health care and expanded educational opportunities (sound familiar?). Most Arabs do not want the US meddling in their internal affairs, but they would welcome assistance in helping their societies.
When we look at the Arab world more closely and listen to Arabs more carefully, we learn that this region and its people are not as they have been imagined by Hollywood or described by political ideologues with an axe to grind. They can not be reduced to the myths and stereotypes that warp our understanding and contribute to distorted policies.
James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute
Sultan Al Qassemi's column will return next week