From the Iranian revolution to the ‘Arab Spring’, the West has consistently been accused of misunderstanding the culture and politics of the Middle East. In 1995, Samuel Huntington's controversial ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis revived the argument of controversial Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis that there was a fundamental ‘cultural divide’ between East and West.3 Western intelligence communities have borne the brunt of such criticism, yet little historical scholarship has explored how Arab culture has been conceived by the world's most important and powerful producers of ‘knowledge’ in recent history.

The theoretical underpinning for this chapter is an important and ongoing debate about Western cultural representations and their validity, evoked by Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism. Said's 1978 study raised groundbreaking questions about Western depictions of the Arab ‘Other’, the purpose and utility of these depictions in justifying European imperial rule and their relation (or lack thereof) to the ‘real’ Arab world.

This chapter brings to scholarly attention for the first time several recently declassified documents of a different nature to assessments usually produced by the British and US diplomatic and intelligence analytic bodies: those focused primarily on the issue of ‘national character’. Unsurprisingly, the declassified documents that deal in length with this issue are few. We can be certain that their authors never imagined that these reflections on Arab culture would ever be available for public consumption. Nonetheless, there are sufficient links between them and repeated reference to their underlying assumptions in more routine diplomatic and intelligence analysis to warrant a critical examination of the intellectual archive or ‘library’ that the Western political elite compiled about the Arab world.