FOR many years the Nobel Prize was considered by most people as a prestigious award, giving deserved prominence to its winners. A change occurred not long ago once the selection committee began including Arab names on its list. At that time, we began to hear reports of how dodgy the awards were and how the committee’s selections are all politicized. Personally, I am not a fan of the prize but it has just occurred to me that the reactions to the choice of winners is usually skeptical when it comes to certain fields — with the Peace Prize being the most outstanding example.
In the categories of medicine and physics, you don’t usually hear skeptical voices raised in protest. Why is this the case? The skepticism intensifies of course if an Arab wins. Comments gradually move from skepticism to direct accusations of hypocrisy or, even worse, being an agent of Western powers.
A columnist for the Saudi daily Al Watan wrote that whenever he hears an Arab has won the prize, his whole body feels cold and his head gets so heavy he has to bow it. He went on to say that where Arab winners are concerned, he feels that they often win as a gift rather than because they are distinguished. To be fair, he did exclude the Egyptian physicist, Ahmad Zwail, from his list of undeserving Arabs who have won. His opinions are shared by a great number of people in the Arab world. In the Arab world, the peace prize is usually seen as being given to those that Western forces are satisfied with, and that that satisfaction is only a façade for a hidden — or not so hidden — agenda. And these days, where Arabs are concerned, Western satisfaction with a person makes him an eternal suspect of treason, hypocrisy and, at the very least, a servile meekness. Politics, it has to be said, has overshadowed the prize and no matter how we try to see it, there is always a question mark hanging over the person who wins the Nobel or any other international honor — apart from those in sports of course.
So when Mohamed El-Baradei was announced as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, the same comments were heard once again and the joy that his compatriots felt was overshadowed by a wave of skepticism.
In a recent discussion on the Nobel Prize, someone said that he thought people were often negative because they failed to understand the nature of the work El-Baradei did, which won him the prize and the accompanying recognition. He said that perhaps if the mechanics of the man’s work and the significance of the organization he works for was made clear to the international public, then maybe then the reaction would be different.
That of course might be part of the reason but I could not help but compare this Egyptian’s winning to the reaction when Ahmad Zwail won the prize for his very complicated scientific work. People were overjoyed with happiness and enthusiasm, though it is sure that most of them had no idea what Zwail’s work was all about or its significance. The problems seem to lie with the prizes that are political and literary. Where literature is concerned, the only Arab to win it — also an Egyptian, Naguib Mahfouz, was faced with a similar storm of accusations and insinuations. Some said he won for political reasons; others said he won because he wrote an anti-Islamic novel — as they referred to one of his books.
But in all of their skeptical remarks, people forgot that the great novelist deserved the prize and that just because it came from the West did not mean he was not worthy of it.
They seem to have overlooked the fact that Mahfouz’s influence on the Arab mind is very large and even when some of us do not realize it, his novels and characters have become part of our heritage. Generalizations about hidden purposes and agendas sometimes conceal the obvious.
Maybe we ought to separate things first to enable us to understand them. If we stop generalizing and look at things in their own context — and maybe also believe a little bit more in our own worth — perhaps then we could begin to appreciate the acclaim that some Arabs have attracted from outside our narrow Arab world.
