The previous political reasons, and others, justify looking at the Arab world as one cultural and one societal unit. In this respect, it stands socio culturally at a midpoint between, say, Western Europe and North America-more culturally homogeneous than the former but less politically united than the latter. There are concentric political-cultural-legal identities for most Arabs, all of them salient and readily evocable. The broader political-cultural identity as an "Arab" is relevant when the person is outside the Arab world. The particularistic-country-legal identity (Syrian, Egyptian, Saudi, Iraqi, etc.) is mostly invoked within the Arab world itself, or when crossing sovereign state borders. Treating the Arab world as one single cultural area and as one Arab society implies an emphasis on the broad cultural "unifiers"-e.g., language, religion, shared traditions, common history, and common aspirations.

But there are as many cultural "diversifiers." For example, within the common language there are different dialects, and within the common religion there are denominations and sects. Times of Arab strength and glory are those in which the "unifiers" are invoked. Periods of weakness or decline are those in which the "diversifiers" are manipulated by indigenous or external forces to divide the Arabs. Much of Arab history can be viewed as the continuous interplay between unifiers and diversifiers. The great heroes in Arab history are those who stimulated the cultural unifiers, especially in times of external challenge (e.g., Salah al-Din during the Crusades, Nasser in the immediate past). Individual and group loyalties in such times are to Islam, the Arab Nation, or the Motherland. On the other hand, the bleak moments in Arab history are when the diversifiers get magnified out of proportion and focus the passions and behavior of individuals and groups on primordial and local loyalties-e.g., ethnicity, sect, and tribe. The concerted Arab action in the October War of 1973 was an example of the power of broad unifiers. The civil wars in Lebanon (1975-1985), Sudan (1956-1973, 1983-1996), Iraq (1964-1975, 1991-1996) and Yemen (North, 1964-1967, and between North and South in 1996) are important examples of stimulating and manipulating diversifiers.