The boys from the much-publicized “Arab Human Development Report 2002,” the group of Arab intellectuals who had placed their societies under a “sympathetic but critical examination” last year, are at it again. They’re expected to release a new study, as I write on this Monday morning, in Amman, Jordan.
You may recall that the thrust of the earlier report was that social malaise in our part of the world rested on three legs of a tripod of backwardness — lack of freedom to express yourself in the public debate and the ballot box; the deterioration of knowledge, transmitted through a woefully wanting educational system; and the low status accorded women in society.
So why show such bad manners, like slamming a door in someone’s face, by pre-empting these folks, critiquing their findings before they are released?
I’ll give you three reasons: First, I’ve been around the block a few times, and after 30 years, and many more gray hairs, studying, reading and writing about why Arabs have failed to meet the challenges of modernity in our time, I feel predisposed to pre-empt anyone I want. Second, scholarly scrupulousness is useful to us only where it can push a line of inquiry in fresh directions, and my recollection of the findings of these distinguished scholars, when they were released last year — a static tabulation of what was wrong with Arab society, absent nuance and context — was that, yawn, yawn, those of us engaged in the public debate had railed against them for years. Third, I find bad manners useful at times and I’m more irritated by their absence than their presence. If it was bad manners to have told those “distinguished scholars,” as I did on this page in July last year, that their “Arab Human Development Report 2002” failed because, in the end, it failed to tell us what clear historical, social and cultural reasons accounted for why it had turned out like that — why backwardness continued to dog us after more than half-a-century of independence — then so be it.
We respect active, engaged intellectuals (Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals”) because they roll up their sleeves, spit on the palms of their hands and get to work explaining why problems afflict their societies, not just what those problems are. Moreover, these intellectuals are good not only because they find solutions to these problems; they find solutions to problems because they are good.
The problems cited in last year’s report were mere symptoms, not the disease. The disease that afflicts the Arab world is a process of socialization that nurtures Arabs on the ethic of fear, fear of originality, innovation and spontaneity, fear of standing up to society’s stringent rules of self-discipline in discourse, where the individual sees himself as a bane of creativity, not its source.
The disease is a stultifying bureaucracy that impacts adversely on the way people live and work — and finally think — in their everyday lives. (In his prize-winning book, “The Mystery of Capital,” Hernand de Soto writes how in Egypt, as a case in point, in order to register a plot or a newly owned property or a business, a citizen “must wend his way through at least 77 bureaucratic procedures at 31 public and private agencies,” which could take anywhere from five to fourteen years, clearly a situation where Egyptians here are not breaking the law as much as the law breaking them.)
The disease is a social system that not only prevents young, astute Arabs from freely exploring the life of the mind in their free media, imposing on that system the humane sobriety of their talents, but either hounds them into exile or hunts them down as subversives.
So you fellows out there in the Jordanian capital, I have this to say to you impertinently so before I’ve read one word of the report: We have one tyranny to surmount in our crushed part of the world — that of the status quo — and I trust you have had the prescience to tell us how to go about confronting it, confronting the decay in our polity, the obscurantism in our public discourse, the defeatism endemic in our self-definitions, and the degraded status we have today in the global dialogue of cultures.
Otherwise, you’re like us lowly columnists, living at second hand, writing about.
— Arab News Opinion 23 October 2003
