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The first, an accomplished anthropologist who died in 1996, is the author of a 1973 book called The Arab Mind.

Let’s just stop for a moment and contemplate that title.

As a student of national identities myself, I have read countless books whose titles make similarly ambitious claims about their ability to “explain” the mindset of one or another of the Iberian Peninsula’s national communities. These texts generally have a couple of things of things in common.

One is that most of them were produced either in the years between 1870 and 1930, which is to say, before pseudo-scientific concepts of race and national spirit were fully debunked, or somewhat later, by writers of an overtly backward-looking cast who were, more often than not, sympathetic to the authoritarian regimes of Salazar (1926-1970) in Portugal and Franco (1939-1975) in Spain.

The other is that no scholar in their right mind would ever, ever dare cite them today as an authoritative guide to understanding national identity or national behaviors.