Arab Academics who claim the literary mantle have failed to address the story of the Palestinians and the Arab peoples from a human standpoint. Most Americans are too busy with their own lives to worry about the lives of the Palestinians, or any other group that has an axe to grind. And the very purpose of literature is to successfully address the masses, the public as a whole. It must be written to reach the largest possible audience. And that is where Arab American writing, as it stood prior to 1990, fails, and fails miserably.
Academic writing is, by nature, often dry and uninviting.
And Arab American academic writing, in particular, has brought this dryness to new heights. It is written to address a very narrow academic audience, although the arrogance of the Arab American academic world allows the writers to believe that the average American will pick up their books. Academic writing is therefore not real literature. Real literature appeals to the widest and most general audience possible. It succeeds by establishing an immediate connection between the story and the person reading.