During the past year, many Americans may be forgiven for succumbing to simplistic, often negative and wildly inaccurate generalizations about other peoples. Muslims and Arabs, especially, have been seen, more often than not, as very different from Americans and American values.

My own experience in the United States and the Arab world has taught me exactly the opposite: I have found that most Arabs and Americans share similar political values and personal aspirations, the main exception being the more conservative social and sexual attitudes one finds in the Middle East. You won't see many green-haired young women with nose rings, bare stomachs and microshorts in many Asian or Arab lands. The confrontations between Americans and Arabs cannot really be explained by imagined cultural or religious differences; they seem to be a consequence of political policies on both sides.

Happily, that was the conclusion reached by two prominent American scholars and presented last week at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Rather than grounds for a clash between Western and Arab cultures, there is much more, it seems, that the two sides have in common.

Pippa Norris of Harvard and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan analyzed World Values Survey public opinion data from 70 countries between 1995 and 2001 on attitudes to democracy, political and religious leadership, and gender and sexuality. They tested this against the "clash of civilizations" thesis of American political scientist Samuel Huntington. He had proposed that post-Cold War fault lines and conflicts among countries would be defined by cultural values rooted in religious beliefs, and that inherent Western/Islamic differences over democratic values would lead to new cultural or civilizational clashes and ethnic conflicts.

The Norris/Inglehart study found that Prof. Huntington was right to see culture and religion as strong determinants of political attitudes, but that he was wrong to see a large difference in democratic values among Islamic and Western cultures. They discovered that "surprisingly similar attitudes toward democracy are found in the West and the Islamic world. . . . Support for democracy is surprisingly widespread among Islamic publics, even among those who live in authoritarian societies. The most basic fault line between the West and Islam does not concern democracy -- it involves issues of gender equality and sexual liberalization."

According to Prof. Norris and Prof. Inglehart, Western and Islamic societies agreed on three indicators of political values: support for democratic ideals; how well democracy worked in practice; and attitudes toward leadership by experts and government officials. The "clash" on these issues was not between Islamic and Western societies, but between the Islamic/Western world and parts of the rest of the world (especially the Orthodox/Russian one).

Adjusting the data for factors such as affluence, democratization, religiosity and gender, the authors found that "support for democracy was marginally slightly stronger (not weaker) among those living in Islamic societies." The major political difference between Western and Islamic cultures was in attitudes to religious leaders' roles, which were more accepted by Muslims than by Westerners.

The research did identify "strong and significant difference" between Western and Islamic attitudes to gender equality, homosexuality, abortion and divorce. The West is consistently more liberal on these issues, and Western youth are becoming even more liberal and egalitarian over time, while young Muslims tend to remain as traditional as their parents and grandparents.

Prof. Norris and Prof. Inglehart concluded that "any claim of a 'clash of civilization,' especially of fundamentally different political values held by Western and Islamic societies, represents an oversimplification of the evidence. Across many political dimensions examined here, both Islamic and Western societies are similar in their positive orientation toward democratic ideals. . . . Any black-and-white 'Islam versus the West' interpretation of a 'culture clash' as conveyed by the popular media is far too simplistic."

The great thing about American culture, like American movies, is that if you hang around long enough, the good guys eventually win, and truth triumphs. It is this sort of quality empirical research that should be conveyed by the mass media. Understanding the reality of the world is probably the most important first step to making it a safe and secure world.
Rami Khouri, a Palestinian from Nazareth, is a journalist based in Amman. He recently completed a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.