The following is the second of a series of excerpts that Al Jazeera will be publishing from The Invisible Arab: The promise and peril of the Arab revolutions. The excerpt from the preface can be found here.
"What went so wrong? How did the dream of liberation from colonialism turn into a nightmare for Arab states of north and northeast Africa and the Middle East? How did sovereignty designed to keep the West out turn into an alibi for keeping the people down? How did self-declared political leaders become national criminals? Why did they last so long and become so brutal, frequently even more so than their colonial predecessors?
In tracing the ills of the modern Arab world, some pundits have highlighted religion as the main source of its "backwardness", while others have underlined Arab cultural deficiencies that prevented the region from embracing rational policies and democratic principles - a mindset known as cultural exceptionalism, or its latest media term, "the caged Arab mind". But it's not within the scope of this essay to expose these and other fallacies about an intrinsic Arab backwardness, or analyze racist views of Arabs and Islam.
What is important to remember is that the Islamic world counts for some of the world's most economically successful and democratic nations, and to recall the great historical periods in Arab civilisation, including the period when Arabs documented, translated, and revived interest in the achievements of the classical world, while Europe was mired in the dark ages. It's also important to remember that full universal suffrage was adopted by the West as late as the twentieth century, with most other countries implementing it only over the last few decades, and recognise how Arabs have embraced the idea of elections whenever possible, even under military occupation, as in the case of recent Iraqi and Palestinian elections, where citizens voted with little hesitation in the hope that their ballots would count.
It's my contention that the roots of Arab problems are not civilisational, economic, philosophical, or theological per se, even if religion, development, and culture have had great influence on the Arab reality. The origins of the miserable Arab reality are political par excellence. Like capital to capitalism, or individualism to liberalism, the use and misuse of political power has been the factor that defines the contemporary Arab state. Arab regimes have subjugated or transformed all facets of Arab society.
Since gaining liberation from Western colonialism, the Arab world has been ruled mostly but not entirely by regimes whose practice has been antithetical to any sense human progress, unity, democracy, and human rights. Those who tried, albeit selectively to chart a better way forward on the basis of national security and national interest, were dissuaded through pressure, boycotted, or defeated on the battlefield. The political backwardness of the larger postcolonial transformation soon became the plague that infected everything else. The guardians of the state who were entrusted with the welfare of their nations monopolised power, controlled the economy, and ignored the civil liberties of the majority in order to privilege the few.
That is why twenty-first-century Arab revolutionaries need to go beyond changing leadership and actually reinvent state structures if they want to transform Arab society......"
"What went so wrong? How did the dream of liberation from colonialism turn into a nightmare for Arab states of north and northeast Africa and the Middle East? How did sovereignty designed to keep the West out turn into an alibi for keeping the people down? How did self-declared political leaders become national criminals? Why did they last so long and become so brutal, frequently even more so than their colonial predecessors?
In tracing the ills of the modern Arab world, some pundits have highlighted religion as the main source of its "backwardness", while others have underlined Arab cultural deficiencies that prevented the region from embracing rational policies and democratic principles - a mindset known as cultural exceptionalism, or its latest media term, "the caged Arab mind". But it's not within the scope of this essay to expose these and other fallacies about an intrinsic Arab backwardness, or analyze racist views of Arabs and Islam.
What is important to remember is that the Islamic world counts for some of the world's most economically successful and democratic nations, and to recall the great historical periods in Arab civilisation, including the period when Arabs documented, translated, and revived interest in the achievements of the classical world, while Europe was mired in the dark ages. It's also important to remember that full universal suffrage was adopted by the West as late as the twentieth century, with most other countries implementing it only over the last few decades, and recognise how Arabs have embraced the idea of elections whenever possible, even under military occupation, as in the case of recent Iraqi and Palestinian elections, where citizens voted with little hesitation in the hope that their ballots would count.
It's my contention that the roots of Arab problems are not civilisational, economic, philosophical, or theological per se, even if religion, development, and culture have had great influence on the Arab reality. The origins of the miserable Arab reality are political par excellence. Like capital to capitalism, or individualism to liberalism, the use and misuse of political power has been the factor that defines the contemporary Arab state. Arab regimes have subjugated or transformed all facets of Arab society.
Since gaining liberation from Western colonialism, the Arab world has been ruled mostly but not entirely by regimes whose practice has been antithetical to any sense human progress, unity, democracy, and human rights. Those who tried, albeit selectively to chart a better way forward on the basis of national security and national interest, were dissuaded through pressure, boycotted, or defeated on the battlefield. The political backwardness of the larger postcolonial transformation soon became the plague that infected everything else. The guardians of the state who were entrusted with the welfare of their nations monopolised power, controlled the economy, and ignored the civil liberties of the majority in order to privilege the few.
That is why twenty-first-century Arab revolutionaries need to go beyond changing leadership and actually reinvent state structures if they want to transform Arab society......"
No comments:
Post a Comment