“Reform” is in the air. It is as abundant as the dust in the Riyadh skies these days, or the humidity in Jeddah. Many are talking about it, especially journalists who take their cues from public pronouncements made by officials. Yet no one has explained in detail its content.
Infatuation with a concept is juvenile; explaining and implementing such a concept is much harder and less glamorous. It also requires a selfless approach and objectivity in vision. Above all, it requires courage. One is reminded of the handful of American men who met to draft the Declaration of Independence. After signing it, one declared that it was time to “hang together.” Benjamin Franklin’s retort was a hallmark of succinct utterances that matches anything history has recorded. He said: “Gentlemen, we either hang together, or we hang separately.”
Luckily, there is no prospect of “hanging separately” in our case. But there are truths just as grave. Reform is a two-way street upon which the two parties meet at some middle point. The first party to this process is the government. I’ll leave that to jurists and pundits to debate. The other one, in which I’m interested, is the rest of us. We, as a people, have little or no initiative because we expect everything to be handed to us without much effort — mental or physical. An employee looking for promotion, for example, will spend more time complaining about the injustice of the system than working at his desk.
Reform, in the shape of popular participation in the making of decisions, requires (as a bare minimum) a sense of the other as an equal entity with equal rights. Slogans and high flying clichés aside, we simply cannot conceive of anything outside of our immediate circle. T. E. Lawrence might have called the Arabs the people of the “individual genius” (something we have not produced in a very long time), but individualism and selfishness are not that far apart. If one is in doubt about this, one need only drive through our streets. Young and old alike drive as if the roads are theirs and empty of other vehicles. If you consider how many die on the roads because of this malady, the analysis is not that simplistic.
I am not saying that we are not ready for some sort of involvement in decision making at a national level. Perhaps we aren’t, I simply don’t know. What I know is that we lack in what might be loosely termed “civic responsibility.” No one is willing to sacrifice anything for the good of the nation or the collective entity that gives us our citizenship. Take the vehement eruption against the United States that has gone on for a while now. None of it seemed ideological or even logical in nature. If you read the press, the astute reader would have seen that most of those writing were simply lamenting the loss of easy access to Orlando. Underneath the verbiage was an infantile shock at having to wait for three weeks to get a visa or being searched at an airport, both being normal procedures to the rest of humanity. Had we engaged the Americans in a more mature and serious way, we might not have convinced them, but we would have earned their grudging respect.
If we engage each other in this “reform” process as we engaged the outsider, we might as well declare the result before any count is over. I think the first order of business in this process is a serious and genuine campaign to tackle corruption. No citizen is safe from this malaise. Even officials who make life miserable for others fall victim to it when, for example, they turn on normal citizens trying to finish a load of paperwork for their sons or daughters. A vicious catch-22 situation has spread like a disease. Mid-level officialdom thrives on this bacterium and they are there by the thousands in both government and private offices. The deadwood who float effortlessly in the swamps of offices deciding who eats lobster and who eats camel meat are the bane of this society.
Corruption instills a sense of injustice in the citizen. Injustice, in its turn, loosens the bonds between nation and citizen. A genuine effort to right this wrong might be our salvation to a sensible reform process that cuts off the path to extremism. An orchestra that can produce the most sublime tunes can be the instrument of the most deafening noise too. As Cicero put it, “what musicians call harmony in song is concord in a state.”
- Arab News Opinion 29 May 2003
