CRISIS IN THE PERSIAN GULF : NEWS ANALYSIS : To Arabs, Unity Stokes the Fire in Their Souls : Strategy: Hussein’s references to such brotherhood has helped him gain support outside Iraq.

Throughout the modern history of the Middle East, no theme runs stronger than that of Arab unity--the passionate belief that one people united by religion, history and language could stand together in a brotherhood of shared goals and actions.

To the Arab masses, the notion is only slightly less compelling than that of godliness.

In the streets of Amman and Baghdad and other capitals where they are not repressed, the slogans of Arab unity have risen anew. And with U.S. troops now in Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, the chants will become louder, not softer, in the weeks ahead. Their message is anti-Western and pro-Islamic, and it rings with the belief that the Arabs stand alone against a conspiratorial world.

Unity, they say, is tantamount to survival.

Arabs believe--or like to believe--that the political rivalries tearing their world asunder are merely temporary obstacles on the road to eventual unity. Culture is a greater force than politics, they believe, and the strength of being Arab is in the heart.

It is a sense of oneness among brethren, a bond born in the sharing of a history that goes back to the earliest days of mankind.

It is also a bond born in the belief that the Arabs have been betrayed by that same history.

No matter that Arab unity, politically at least, is an illusion. Or that, in the regional turmoil of the last 40 years, Arab leaders have viewed each other privately with distrust, hostility and often contempt. Theirs is a fraternity of animosity, where private suspicions are camouflaged by public embraces and respectful words.

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, for instance, wouldn’t think of attending an Arab League meeting without taking along his food taster to make sure his hosts do not poison him. Libya’s Moammar Kadafi knows that when he flies into Morocco, King Hassan II will greet him on the tarmac with a kiss on both checks--and not let him take a step until his bodyguards have been disarmed.

The gravest damage to the ranks of Palestinian leadership has been inflicted not by the Israelis but by Palestinian assassins.

One might think that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait would lay to rest any further talk of Arab unity, because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has done precisely what the Arabs accuse the Israelis of doing--seizing the land of others in pursuit of nationalistic ambitions. Egypt, after all, was expelled from the Arab League merely for making peace with Israel, so it might seem logical that the Arabs would consider Iraq guilty of a far greater crime by invading and annexing a sovereign Arab nation.

In the event, however, Saddam Hussein is seen by many as a new champion of Arab unity.

In the rhetoric of Arabia, style counts more than substance, and the brutal Saddam Hussein has mustered some Arab support beyond his borders not because of what he has done, but rather because of the buzzwords he has chosen: Foreigners out! Down with Israel! God is great!

The response to Saddam is reminiscent of that which used to greet Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s. Huge crowds rallied for his speeches. They cheered each word. Then everyone left, not believing literally anything he had said. But just hearing all that talk about the invincibility of an Arab nation made them feel good inside.

Arab unity has never existed in the political sense because the Middle East is run by kings and generals motivated primarily by national interests and personal ambitions. Their rule is centralized, personalized and often built around a personality cult.

Their region is without a democratic tradition--there is not, in fact, an elected mayor in the Arab world--and although the masses are saying, “We are all Muslims. We cannot be divided by borders,” Arab leaders are using borders to define their own ideological and economic goals.

The land inside those borders includes 167 million Arabs (94% of whom are Muslim) in 18 countries, and their diversity makes it difficult to think of a single people. The per-capita income in Qatar, for example, is $42,000; in Yemen, it is $400. An Omani lives in Asia, a Tunisian in Africa. Sudan is one-third the size of the United States; Bahrain would fit neatly inside the boundaries of New York City.

Morocco’s king tied his allegiance to Washington; Syria’s president, to Moscow. Saudis are lashed in public for drinking alcohol; Dubaians can imbibe freely. Egypt has fought in four Arab-Israeli wars; Saudi Arabia tried to enter only one of them, but the two brigades it dispatched to Israel in 1948 did not reach the border until after the war was over.

Not surprisingly, Arab scholars have debated for years, trying to answer the question: Who is an Arab? Their answer is that an Arab is someone who speaks Arabic, the holy language of the Koran. It is the only definition that seems to fit.

Common language--and a common sense of grievance against the past.

It was the Arab lands that gave birth to the first known civilizations, and, at a time when Europe was populated by nomadic tribes who lived in mud huts, the Egyptians were recording their history in a written language and laying out systems of canals and ditches for irrigation.

Later, after the birth of Islam in the 7th Century, the great Arab cities--Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Cordoba in Spain--became the intellectual centers of the world, nurturing the foremost philosophers and scientists as well as the finest libraries and universities to be found anywhere. It was from the West, the Arabs believe, that the forces of destruction came.

The Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries were the equivalent of a Christian holy war. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, a secret treaty signed by Britain, France and Russia, divided the Arabs among foreign powers, denying them the independence Europe had promised they would have after World War I. The British government’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 provided the Jews with a deed of trust for Palestine, and Western support in 1948 made the birth of Israel possible.

Pan-Arabism found a receptive audience in the 1920s and 1930s, replacing Islamic movements that had fallen victim to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Pan-Arabism, like Zionism, was nationalistic, and its increasing popularity paralleled that of Zionism’s growth. The early leaders espousing the benefits of a unified Arab world were Arab Christians. They saw the movement as a way of separating church and state so they could share power with the Muslim majority.

It is that Muslim majority, however, that dominates Arabism today.

And it is not surprising that pan-Arab feeling is rising again in the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The concept of Arab unity always seems to have its deepest appeal in times of crisis, in times when Arabs are reminded how much has failed them.

Unity is their security robe, an ideal to which Arab leaders have only paid lip service, but one that the masses believe is--like religion--a balm for the pain of a people’s wounded pride.

David Lamb was The Times’ Cairo bureau chief from 1982 to 1985 and is the author of “The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage.”