The bubbling sounds in the water pipes, the blaring of an Umm Kulthum song in the background, and the men sitting in their neighborhood cafes growling laments, in colorful bursts of brilliant oral Arabic, about the desperately pitiful social and economic conditions they and their families are daily having to endure — that was one image I took with me in my mid-teens when I left the Arab world for good around four decades ago.
The image was of a people who had come to accept all the gloom and doom in their daily lives as the norm. Socialized as they were on the ethic of fear, they knew better than to challenge the powers that be. Make the best of what little you have, eat humble pie, take it all on the chin, and wait to go to your grave — there if nowhere else — with a certain measure of dignity, much in the manner of those violin players on the Titanic.
These days the reality is not much different.
What has gone wrong in our world?
Well, the facts are in, and so is the buzz about them. What the “Arab Human Rights Development Report 2002” had to say about our region, though disturbing, was not in the least surprising. Arab intellectuals have endlessly debated the issue of why their society has remained stuck behind the times, unable to meet the challenges of modernity, especially given the fact that Arabs share a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage — and had pretty much arrived at the same conclusions.
The report received a lot of attention in the American and European media not only because of its notable frankness but also because it was sponsored by the UN Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, and written by a “group of distinguished Arab intellectuals” who “have placed their societies under a sympathetic but critical examination and have exposed strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats about themselves in a way that perhaps only Arabs should.”
In other words, the Arab world is taking a hard look at itself. All well and good. I say, let’s go for it.
The thrust of what the report had to say rested on three legs of a tripod of backwardness, with the first being the question of freedom, or lack thereof, to express yourself openly in the public debate and at the ballot box; secondly, the issue of knowledge, and how that is transmitted through a woefully wanting educational system that, if anything, has deteriorated even further in recent years; and finally the problem of the status of women in society, which the report asserts are not treated as full citizens.
There is no need here to parse the entire report. Though we take our hat off to this “group of distinguished Arab intellectuals” for their findings, the fact is that these findings are, well, old hat. So many of us engaged in the public debate have repeatedly identified those very same problems and railed against the root causes behind them. The report presented us with a static tabulation of what was wrong in Arab society, but absent nuance and context.
What clear historical, social and psychological reasons, for example, account for why it has turned out like this? Is there something in Arab polity itself, in modern Arab culture, and perhaps even in the constitution of the Arab personality today that has made Arabs prone or responsive to the very social ills that the report cites?
If it is all, in other words, all about backwardness, but why is backwardness still with us after more than half-a-century of independence?
What afflicts Arab society in our modern times is not, in the strict sense of the word, backwardness but a more sinister expression of it, what I would call here neobackwardness. We see it in the spectacle of an Arab who seemingly possesses all the attributes of modernity: He has a university degree, works in a high-tech office, speaks several languages, travels extensively, and appears normal to the naked eye, but once you scratch beneath that veneer, you find him infected with the deadly germ of stultifying traditionalism. He is convinced that he has made the leap to modernity, that his transformation is not shallow and superficial, and that he is not, in effect, a mere caricatural Westernized Arab. His peasant counterpart, confronted by his backwardness, will admit it and ask you gratefully for ways to overcome it. Neobackward Arabs, however, will continue, like alcoholics, to deny their affliction.
Neobackward Arabs would be of no concern to us here were it not for the fact that they are the dominant elite in our world today, directing its destiny, defining its identity and consolidating its bastard modes of social existence.
The problem of lack of freedom in Arab society — as manifested, say, in how a dissident is denied a hearing and a citizen the right to inquire and speak without fear of retribution — of education by rote, and of women deprived and excluded, is a function of this type of backwardness. Or is it, you ask, the other way around, with this tripod generating the backwardness? Let’s dispense here with the chicken-and-egg circularity that this question begs, and instead just simply admit that we have problems galore in the Arab world, beyond those cited in the report.
Take the more pressing problem of socialization.
True, Arab countries are a heterogeneous group, and we generalize about them at peril of defeating our own argument. But the differences between them are differences in kind not in degree. Everywhere in the Arab world today, in one way or another, a process of socialization continues to instill in the individual, from cradle to grave, the need to accept orthodoxy, dependency and submission, which, in turn, triggers in that individual a sense of fear — fear of originality, innovation and spontaneity, fear of life itself. A man — and, it would now appear, more so a woman — thus actively participates in perpetuating a broken-down society by accepting its stringent rules of self-discipline, and its definition of him as a bane of creativity, not its source.
In this social ambience, absurd conspiracy theories, paranoid anti-Americanism and racist fantasies, among other loony tunes and ideas, will thrive, breeding a profound sickness in the public discourse, where purveyors of tall tales are embraced and truth is facilely turned on its head.
The problem here is that of a whole people who appear to have quietly acquiesced in the forfeiture of their powers of self-determination.
We need to get over our fear of emulating successful societies and borrowing progressive ideas from them as we take risks to meet the challenges of modernity.
Just because today the West is stronger than we are in the East does not mean its civilization is inherently superior to ours. It does, however, mean that it has things that would be useful for us to appropriate or to learn from. In the global dialogue of cultures people lend and borrow from each other all the time. As human beings we are all, really, part of one another, of and from each other. Look even at the achievements of “primitive man” in ancient times, and how his inventions of pottery, the weaving of cloth, agriculture, and the domestication of animals, remain with us today as the substratum of modern human society.
Our own rich Arab cultural heritage is there for us to mine, as is that of other peoples’.
If we sit on our laurels and tell each other ad nauseam, as we are wont to do, about the glories of our past — yawn, yawn — that’s like rest to a man who is not tired. If we take the “Arab Human Rights Development Report 2002” as a starting point to move forward, then it’s like water in a drought.
Let’s get those shovels out of the shed, roll up our sleeves, spit on the palms of our hands, and get to work. There might be hope for us yet.
Does anyone see a port in this storm? ([email protected])
