[@Penny] No worries. The TL;DR is the flight of the intelligentsia begin in earnest after the six day war dealt the fatal blow to Arab nationalism and the conceptual vacuum begin to be filled by fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. There was a wave of assassinations of cultural voices by Islamist assassins that really got rolling during Anwar Sadat's day. A generation of intelligentsia fled west but that was not enough; Germany and Spain were host a number of assassinations after Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the last Shah. The Kurds in particular suffered. At this point there really isn't much of an intelligentsia left in the middle east but their grandchildren can be found scattered across Europe and America.