Last week, one of my best friends presented me with a valuable and insightful book as a gift. The book was by Oxford University lecturer Eugene Rogan, in which he was delving deeply in old Arabic sources and texts to form a comprehensive portrayal of the last five centuries of Arab history.
The more I read about our rich history, the more I become eager to research the challenges and issues that are currently facing us and in the near future.
The most essential criterion that I found in all major issues was the fact that we are very much affected today more than ever by mutual relations with the international community.
For the past couple of years the dominating concern in the Arab media is perhaps the radical changes stemming from the Arab spring, which is a continuum of the US-Russia standoff over international policy and the future of political domination in the post cold-war era. The Arab community is living under the same conditions as the Eastern Europe countries did in 1989, in what used to be known as the Velvet Revolution.
Advances in telecommunications and transportation fields have paved the way for the critical theme of Globalization. Free trade agreements and the sudden expansion of capitalism and democracy have resulted in a wide controversy over economic and cultural shifts that most countries have a real hard time keeping up with.
The United Nations estimates that world population will reach 9.2 billion by mid-21st century, which will create tremendous pressure on natural resources in our area, epically the two invaluable substances of oil and water.
Although we have not come to face these challenges for the time being, they are sure to become priorities in the future.
Other ongoing and predicted issues would include the continuous war on terrorism, combating poverty and growing diseases, as well as rising arguments over intellectual property rights, alarming climate changes and global warming. These may constitute some of the major tangled global issues that will occupy the minds of our intellectuals in the near future.
While Arab governments and politicians are trying to cope with these local and international developments, it is imperative to recognize that widespread participation is a key factor in finding a remedy to these new transformations. Giving their people more roles and responsibilities is the sure way of insuring more vibrant and balanced communities.
A tweet: “Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.” — Isaac Asimov
@ msalsaif
