The news over the last two weeks assaulted us with bleak clarity: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein meekly surrendered to American troops as he crawled out of a hole in the ground; Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi quietly agreed to surrender his unconventional weapons to international inspectors; and Israel’s Ariel Sharon declared in a speech that he will, in effect, do in Palestine what he darn well pleases, and what the devil are Arabs going to do about it anyhow?
Bleak indeed, for it all makes a statement about how at the center of the Arab world’s material life today is a profound deadness of spirit — a torrential frenzy of words at the surface, but at the heart, a queer silence.
What has gone dead is Arab culture and with it the Arab language itself.
Since “independence” well over half a century ago, Arabs have endured regimes that in one form or another, and to one degree or another, imposed on them pervasive instruments of social control, stultifying their consciousness to a point where all dynamics of change from within was neutralized.
You can, over time, neutralize the innate need of a community to be free — its will-to-meaning, as it were — but there always comes a moment when the choked psyche will lash out, gasping for breath.
Enter the terrorists. A political culture whose springs of life have run dry will not only produce terrorists — who in this case have obscenely appropriated Islam as their social ideology — but it will inflict irreparable damage on language, an instrument of rational exchange whose powers of absorption and growth are linked inextricably to the life-force of the culture that speaks it.
Note how the more Arab society became broken in back and spirit (I need not refer you here to the gut-wrenching facts about our world in the Arab Human Development Report 2003) the more the Arab establishment, that traditionally has designated itself the arbiter even of how we string words together, drilled into the language a mixture of grossness, flights of romantic grandeur and a terrible weakness for the saccharine slogan and the pompous cliche — an ideal environment for those confused scribes who write on our front pages, touting improbable conspiracy theories, thus adding to the inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation that our once great language has been reduced to.
The life of the mind, that to classical Arabs was once spontaneous, rigorous and subtle, has today become mechanical and ambiguous, no longer sharpening thought but blunting it.
Thus when allegedly responsible Arab writers descend to such banalities as to tell you about the capture of “Saddam’s double,” you know something is amiss.
The modern Arab world has become hollow at the center, I say, and our language is giving massive echo of that condition.
All of which takes us back to the simple maxim that in social life, genuine freedom is a necessary function of stability, and stability of progress.
The Arab world today is helpless at meeting the challenges of modernity, not to mention outside threats to occupy it, because its ruling elite have, since that putative independence more than five decades ago, made a devil’s pact with socio-political necessity: The demon promised them the secret of sustained power at the cost of denying the innate needs of their populations for freedom and social justice.
But the time comes, as it always does, for the devil to lurk about, asking for his fee to be paid. Over the last two weeks, he knocked ever more loudly at the door.
Let those of us in civil society take that knock as a wake-up call, for we have — and please reassure me here that we indeed have — hit rock bottom. And from there we take stock and go on up to put some color in our face and some fight in our belly.
