By: Gilbert Achcar
Al-Akhbar
"In a manner infused with the spirit of Western Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said, some Arabs have held that a despotic mentality has taken root among most of their fellow Arabs as a result of their cultural and educational background.
One advocate of such a view in the not-so-distant past was Moncef Marzouki, the transitional president of Tunisia, when he was still living in France as an opponent in exile of the previous president, the tyrant Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
In an article he published on Al Jazeera’s website on 19 February 2010, Marzouki cited the French scholar Beatrice Hibou, author of The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, who belongs to the Orientalist school, that explained the Tunisians’ alleged “obedience” to their tyrants by attributing it to a mentality ingrained in them over the course of generations (these theses have been powerfully refuted by the Tunisian scholar Mahmoud Ben Romdhane in a recent book in French).
Marzouki argued that whoever reads Hibou’s book “understands that what bewilders the Western mind about Arabs is our transcendent ability to obey the most corrupt of rulers, while Western culture is based on the refusal to obey injustice and on legitimizing the right to resist it.”
Al-Akhbar
"In a manner infused with the spirit of Western Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said, some Arabs have held that a despotic mentality has taken root among most of their fellow Arabs as a result of their cultural and educational background.
One advocate of such a view in the not-so-distant past was Moncef Marzouki, the transitional president of Tunisia, when he was still living in France as an opponent in exile of the previous president, the tyrant Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
In an article he published on Al Jazeera’s website on 19 February 2010, Marzouki cited the French scholar Beatrice Hibou, author of The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, who belongs to the Orientalist school, that explained the Tunisians’ alleged “obedience” to their tyrants by attributing it to a mentality ingrained in them over the course of generations (these theses have been powerfully refuted by the Tunisian scholar Mahmoud Ben Romdhane in a recent book in French).
Marzouki argued that whoever reads Hibou’s book “understands that what bewilders the Western mind about Arabs is our transcendent ability to obey the most corrupt of rulers, while Western culture is based on the refusal to obey injustice and on legitimizing the right to resist it.”
He thus added to the Orientalist image of Arabs an idealized image of “Western culture” as if it were an eternal given.....
One does not need extraordinary insight to realize that the winners of the first post-uprising elections and governments are truly the opportunists and not the revolutionaries, as Marzouki himself rightly said when he was still moved by the thrill and wisdom of the revolution.
Condemning labor strikes and blaming them for the country’s economic decline, as well as playing that same old tune of the “extremists” and “subversives” of the “far left,” have become the common language of the new rulers in both Tunisia and Egypt, in a way that reminds us irresistibly of the deposed regimes.
But the masses that one day aspired to life and experienced the taste of freedom will not stop struggling and protesting before “fate answers their call,” even if only years later."
One does not need extraordinary insight to realize that the winners of the first post-uprising elections and governments are truly the opportunists and not the revolutionaries, as Marzouki himself rightly said when he was still moved by the thrill and wisdom of the revolution.
Condemning labor strikes and blaming them for the country’s economic decline, as well as playing that same old tune of the “extremists” and “subversives” of the “far left,” have become the common language of the new rulers in both Tunisia and Egypt, in a way that reminds us irresistibly of the deposed regimes.
But the masses that one day aspired to life and experienced the taste of freedom will not stop struggling and protesting before “fate answers their call,” even if only years later."
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