End of a rich Arabian journey

They are graceful, and full of bitterness; mired in the past's traditions, and infatuated with modernity; welcoming to strangers, and convinced of their own permanent role as victims of a hostile world.

Their religion is awash with the words of community; their societies have evolved into systems of hierarchical servitude. Their culture, in its phase of greatest glory, reached pinnacles of unmatched artistic perfection; its successor nations today struggle to break free from a tide of kitschy retrospect.

Their smallest societies drip with wealth; their largest countries are plunged in poverty and underdevelopment. Their diplomatic relationships are marked by rivalry, feud and war; their chief unifying cause is an imagined duel with a convenient, half-known enemy.

Social, conversational, rhetorical, inclined to stoke their passions into extremes of mutual fantasy, they punctuate their days with moments of deep prayer before a solitary, enigmatic God. They are candid and affectionate, conspiratorial and hypocritical, as varied as the stars in the sky, and instantly recognisable as inheritors of a single, shared stamp and identity. Human – tragically and delightedly so.

Who, after a year plunged in the dream palace of the Arabs, would not feel, as I do now, bidding it farewell, a mixed sense of admiration and exasperation, of love, fellow-feeling and regret on glancing back at this proud, disrupted world? Who, too, would not wonder precisely what factors have consigned the Arab peoples to their current context?

The easy answers all have truth: Arab society is as it is today because of history and language, the habits of power and the patterns of religious practice. But there is something more to the Arab condition, as the scores of thousands of agonised, prolific intellectuals and writers strewn through the great Middle Eastern cities know all too well. This something relates to the sensibility, the tone of their culture, its lavish, divided, endlessly captivating essence.

For a visiting correspondent, the first ways into this realm are somewhat less sophisticated. There are the blunt facts of the Arab world to master: its bleak economic plight, its systematic disadvantaging of women, the failures of education so mournfully anatomised in the latest regional development reports.

There are the modes of Arab self-perception, which differ vastly from the stereotypes in circulation in the West – to such an extent, in fact, that one could almost speak of an alternative world history written and disseminated in the Arab-speaking medium, and ignored elsewhere. For this is a group of countries that have been, and still are, the target of extraordinary foreign interventions: yet they are also societies that exist and thrive on contact and contest with outside powers.

Perhaps the swiftest path towards the contemporary Arab world, though, comes from chance impressions, harvested in backroad travels or treks through the less favoured suburbs of teeming capitals.

Here, strange commonalities can be seen between the various Arab societies. Attitudes and styles of behaviour are similar, in subtle ways, in ultra-Western centres like Beirut, and in the bedouin villages of south Jordan or the Syrian desert; life-paths unfold in parallel in the Maghreb cities of Tunisia and Morocco, in the traffic-choked heart of Aleppo and in the war-shattered provinces of Iraq.

In each of these places, the song of the mobile, with its ring-tone of traditional music, is now omnipresent, whether in the hands of bearded Islamists or louche teenagers. Osama bin Laden is widely encountered on T-shirts, but perhaps not quite as much discussed in online chat groups as that ultimate icon of Arab girlhood, Britney Spears. Advertising is obsessively followed, and plays a role in many countries as a tantalising emblem of luxury, a window on the distant, excitingly decadent Western world.

Brands are vital: Syrian goatherds will embellish the "Hyundai" letters on the back of their utes with loving hands. Public discussion in tea-houses, in the smart mall KFCs, Cinnabons and Starbucks lounges will focus strongly on the progress of favourite television soaps: surreal dramas, their storylines invariably thick with jealousy, disasters, dark looks, emotions expended in furiously unrepressed profusion.

Crowds are everywhere, even in the smallest villages, but lines never form: the notion of the queue is foreign to Arab nations: these are societies that run on family and extended tribal lines, and hence, one is tempted to say, they have virtually no true social capital, no sense of mutual fairness between citizens. Bribery and corruption are natural results of this pattern. The average citizen is plunged in a constant Darwinian contest against his rivals, striving for advantage in a frustrating, lifelong engagement with grim, empowered masters from the bureaucratic, governmental world.

Sentiment is a big part of life; city-dwellers idealise early Muslim history and the desert past of the prophet's day – but complete disregard for the natural environment is routine. Indeed, a casual observer, moving through the hinterland of countries as diverse as Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan cannot fail to notice the rubbish-piles or the countless millions of discarded black plastic bags, littering the countryside, drifting in little whirlwinds through the air, caught up on fencelines, as if some frantic regional competition to devastate the landscape had been in progress for several years.

For all this ecological vandalism, animals have deep significance – but only certain, specially favoured species. Dogs are unclean, savage, and much disliked. Cats are cunning and resourceful; horses are Koranic, camels traditional. The best thing to be, though, is a hawk: hawks are noble hunting creatures, emblems of kingship, and thus, obviously, honorary Arabs.

For man is supreme: and "man", in Arab life, means men. Male vanity is a striking aspect of this collection of linked societies: a clean beardline is something worth suffering for; the way one wears one's headdress tells a great deal about one's inmost character.

Such are the striking, outward signs that catch the eye. But deep Arab identity cuts through to something higher, at once profound and simple. It is not the same as Islam, yet Islam is its core – grand, fatalistic, and locked up in the Arab language.

The main Sunni faith is a school of vast congregational mosques and sincere devotion of a kind the West abandoned long ago. Shia Islam, predominant in Iraq, reminds many observers of Christianity, with its strong sense of personal connection to its slain, suffering hero, Hussein. And Sufism, the most beguiling of Islam's many currents, conjures up a world of poetry and ecstatic insight – a garden of flowering belief.

Much of the evident "difference" of the Arab domain, its austerity, its focus on trade rather than growth, on consumption rather than husbandry, is in great part the consequence of geographic constraint: the remains of the first Islamic empire carved out 1400 years ago stretch across what are now scorched, near-desert realms. Where fertile land is held by Arabs, the result is variegated, hedonistic Lebanon, a country that you might think could slip almost unnoticed into the multiplicit world of the European Union.

History is another defining factor: there has been no religious reformation; democratic government, for all its charm, is a borrowed idea. The natural political mode remains that of the chief, and his associated underlings. This is not necessarily a dysfunctional way of running a society: in some Gulf states, genuine, responsive social contracts hold between ruling emirs and their most humble subjects.

Many of the more startling anomalies of Arab countries have their origins in colonial days, when Arabs were the characters in national narratives written by others, rather than actors in their own stories: that experience of colonial authorship persists in European attitudes to Islam, in the romance of attraction and repulsion between Western and Arab cultures, and in the new American development of Middle Eastern mastery.

The final key, of course, is Arabic itself – a language so succinct, so emotive and rich it makes up a separate universe. It makes, in fact, the whole dream palace of the Arabs – a habitation those without a gleam of Arabic cannot even see, let alone enter and promenade within.

Arabic, even today's brisk vernacular, contains the ghost of the revealed Koranic word of God. It is a primal, highly coloured tongue; mastery of its deep registers confers power and poetic appeal. The late King Hussein of Jordan derived much of his enduring authority in the Arab lands from his sonorous, perfect classical language. Saddam Hussein could give speeches of sharp rhetorical violence. Osama bin Laden likes to choose a restrained, windswept desert palette, redolent of pure, antique belief, for his occasional cameos on Al-Jazeera satellite TV. More than the representatives of any other great civilisation, the Arabs are their words, and the avalanches of passion and conviction in those words that carry them away.

Such were the realisations that began to dawn on me, in my early days as a visitor in this world – and it was only later, as impressions were piled upon contradictory impressions, that I formed the idea that it might be useful to weigh up my experiences in terms of an Arab character, a prompt, extreme, unguarded sensibility, one inclined to embrace, rather than recoil from life.

How many stories I could multiply, and fail to catch this quality: but let me end my last sketch with a true tale that might come from the endlessly spun Arabian Nights. It begins in Lebanon, and it goes to the doubleness of Arab tastes, the opposing poles of refinement and appetite, of beauty and of sensuality.

Two celebrated girl singers based in Beirut, Nancy Ajram and Nawal Al-Zoughby, now dominate the radio airwaves and the hectic realm of pan-Arab music videos. Nawal is elegant, and understated; Nancy is, even by Lebanese standards, overtly and shockingly sexy. Nawal's image stares down from a thousand advertisements; Nancy has just become the face of Coca-Cola across the Arab world. Both are instantly recognisable, by look and voice, and of far more interest to most Arabs, young and not so young, than any grey prime minister or head of state.

Discussions of their doings are carried on with great engagement. Magazines and talk shows track their rivalry. "The crisis is developing," one bazaar clothes trader in Tripoli explained to me, leaning forward in confidential fashion, with utmost sincerity, as we spoke one lunchtime about this captivating pair: "You see, Nancy is going wrong! Her career is taking the wrong path. Too much foreign influence, too much copying Western music. If only I could talk to her, advise her. She needs a friendly father figure. She needs a guide, like the whole Arab world. We have too many bad fathers, bad leaders, following the West. I could help her – the ordinary little man could help her find a way."

A few months later, in Dubai, I fell into another metaphorical conversation, this time with a prominent Palestinian writer. As we gazed out across the horizon filled with cranes and gleaming new skyscrapers, I explained my developing theory of Arab identity, of Nawal, Nancy and what they had come to symbolise.

He listened, in reflective fashion. "It's not the most stupid idea in the world," he said, kindly, after a while. "We Arabs betray ourselves too much, we rush to the most extreme positions. Only when we know how to unify the two sides of our culture, the calculating and the intuitive, the cool and the emotional, only when we balance and moderate ourselves will we take our rightful place in modernity.

"But then what would we do? We would no longer be real Arabs, full of the violence of life – and the rest of the world would no longer hate us and be half in love with us at the same time."