The long awaited Arab rebuttal of the controversial UNDP Arab Human Development Report has finally been published in book form: “The Illusion of Progress in the Arab World: A Critique of Western Misconstructions,” written by Egyptian economist Galal Amin.
Few might have read the original report but many are familiar with some of the UN Agency’s critical findings which were publicized in the Arab press. In the second Arab Human Development subtitled “Building a Knowledge Society” which was released in August 2003, we learned that the number of newspapers in Arab countries is fewer than 53 for every thousand people as compared with 275 per thousand in more developed countries.
The number of computers is 18 per thousand in the Arab region as compared with the world average of 78.3 per thousand. Furthermore the average number of books translated per one million people in the Arab world in the first five years of the 1990’s was 4.4 (which is apparently less than one book per year for every million people) while the corresponding number was 519 books per million in Hungary and 920 per million in Spain. The report, crammed with unflattering numbers, charts and comparisons, underlined the “impression of a huge need for spurring the acquisition of knowledge in Arab countries”.
Galal Amin not only condemns the biased UNDP report but he also attempts to analyze the misleading western concepts of progress and backwardness as applied to the Arab world. He discusses, with a keen intellectual insight always laced with humor, the alleged advance of the West compared with the lagging behind of the Arabs. He questions the idea of progress: That history represents a continuous movement from bad to better. This concept leads us to believe that the modern period is the best of all. But is it really?
“How exactly did these ideas of progress and backwardness seep so indeliblinto our minds? The first answer that may come to mind is an old observation of Ibn Khaldun, of the tendency of the conquered to imitate the conqueror. Victory in any field is something to be desired and this observation by itself is a convincing explanation of the foreigner complex that is a feeling of inferiority to Europeans or Americans that many Arabs have, especially when victory is combined with a constant harping by the media commanded by the victors that they possess not only power but all things good” says Amin.
This has led us to believe that enhanced power, material affluence and efficiency must symbolize advancement in all aspects of life. Yet many feel that the spread of consumerism has adversely affected the quality of literature and art. And who can tell yet whether the social effects of the television, the mobile telephone or the Internet have been positive?
The author also questions the United Nations definition of human rights. Why should everyone understand the concept of human rights in the same way? In Asian, Middle-Eastern and African families, the elders have a right to live with their children but Westerners do not recognize this as a human right: “And it is particularly humiliating to see one culture singling itself out, and giving itself the right to act as a policeman responsible for enforcing what it calls human rights when these are often no more than the rights recognized by this particular culture, which happens to be, at this particular point in history, the most advanced economically and the greatest military power” says Amin.
Galal Amin has written a fine chapter on the subject of ‘economic development.’ He reminds us that colonial powers were against economic development in the poorer countries they governed. Economic development during colonial times did not serve their political interests. Economic goals included exploiting the cheap labor, the raw materials and marketing any products made in the colonized countries. It was only around the middle of the twentieth century that developed countries encouraged economic progress as they began searching for new markets to export new types of goods — cars, televisions, washing machines, refrigerators — which they were manufacturing. Countries traditionally known as backward were then conveniently labeled ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing.’ Some kind of development was needed in those countries so they could buy Western consumer goods. But as Amin notes, international organizations always stressed the need for material needs, ignoring that human beings also have cultural needs and that national cultures needs protection. With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the United States emergence as the only leader, the danger of communism was promptly replaced by the impending ‘clash of civilizations’: “We suddenly found our culture, whether defined as Muslim, Arab, or Egyptian, being described as being in a ‘clash’ with that of the West, which was of course assumed to be more worthy of survival. The strange thing is that we fell into the trap yet again, failing to note that the conditions of the world may not be so much that of a clash of civilizations as an attack by one culture upon another... As if all this were not enough, our national culture is now being described not just as backward or underdeveloped but as breeding terrorists” says Amin.
The Arab Human Development Report claims to present an accurate measure of human progress and backwardness by replacing the per capita income with three indicators: Freedom or democracy, the state of knowledge and the empowerment of women. But Galal Amin wonders whether the need for democracy, greater knowledge and the empowerment of women advocated by the UNDP is not pointing to a hidden agenda including the control of oil, opening of new markets, or the greater empowerment of Israel: “the kind of modernization which is offered to us in the guise of reform is backed by the power of the gun... an invitation coupled with a threat, which must make us very suspicious whether the goal is true democracy, real advancement of knowledge and of the position of women, or something entirely different,” concludes Amin.