Is anything left of the Arab civilization?
For decades, the Arab civilization has been going backwards, to finally reach its current bottom. There's chaos and tyranny reigning throughout the Arab world, and political Islam has nothing to do with popular representation. Generations of Arabs have let themselves be manipulated by various nationalists, socialists and Islamists, who've always preached that the enemy is beyond the fortress walls, while it was inside the city all the time. A great civilization has been plunged into chaos that won't go away any time soon.
All hopes that sprouted with the new Arab spring, are now but dead and buried. They didn't turn out as simple to realize as they initially seemed: people expected democratic participation in politics, and restoration of human dignity. But these hopes soon evaporated when they clashed with reality. What remains in their place is civil war, ethnic, religious and regional conflict, and resurging militant absolutism. The archaic, anachronistic Gulf monarchies and emirates alone (plus maybe Tunisia) are still able to withstand that level of disruption. Elsewhere in the Arab world there's essentially no legitimacy left. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and starting to clean up the mess, the Arabs are only digging ever deeper.
It's hard to explain in simple words why all ideologies and political movements that have cast roots on Arab soil for the last century or so, have failed so spectacularly one after another. Arab nationalism has failed - both Nasser's version and the Baathist one. The multiple moderate Islamist movements have failed too. Arab socialism has failed. State-sanctioned oligarchies have failed. Today, most Arab societies are a ruin - unless they're stagnant, retrograde, reactionary Medieval ones.
That the whole area from Basra to the Atlas mountains and from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is drowned in bloodshed between Shia and Sunni, cannot be explained with religious hatred alone. There's a geopolitical war going on, where the Shia world is led by Iran and the Sunni one by Saudi Arabia, along with their respective aides. There's no rational explanation for the horrors in Syria and Iraq. In those two countries the geopolitical, religious and ethnic polarization has become so radical that no one has the faintest idea how these areas could ever be restored with anything remotely resembling statehood - and mind you, those societies are sitting right on top of the cradle of human civilization.
And what about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain? More chaos and crumbling statehood. After the demise of the national states of the past, today the Arab world is dominated by militant Islamism. Under its blows, the diverse secularism of once cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria and Beirut, Cairo and Damascus, is just a shadow of what it used to be. All across the region, Islamism is forcing women to cover their faces and requiring of men to display constant attestations of piety. Intellectuals and people of arts who are unwilling to conform to the new requirements, are mercilessly persecuted. In Egypt for example, there are no longer any good universities, and the newspapers overflow with xenophobia, paranoia and ultra-nationalism.
In other words, the jihadists from ISIL didn't just pop up out of nowhere. They're a symptom of a much deeper ailment, which had started eroding the Arab culture decades ago. In the 20th century, the Arab nationalists, especially the Baathists, were obsessed with the idea of restoring the Arab greatness of old. They believed that the Arab language and Arab culture (and Islam, to a much lesser degree) were sufficient to unite the diverse and often contradictory social, political and cultural tendencies in those societies. Those nationalists refused to recognize that the world was a different place from the one that existed in their dreams. They heavily discriminated against all minorities who were opposed to their ideals. It was under the reign of Arab nationalism that the prototype of the modern tyrant emerged: leaders like Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad. But when it became apparent that they were just as incompetent as the marionette monarchs that they had deposed, these dictators, in turn, essentially paved the way for aggressive Islamism.
"If the problem is the demise of the Arab world, then Islam is the solution" - that's the slogan that has helped the Islamists gain so many followers. In the 80s and 90s, the dictators were desperately clutching at their waning power, and through brutal oppression they tried to preserve it. But the Islamists withstood all persecution, and they constantly crawled back from under the woodwork, assuming all sorts of reincarnations. 1979 was a turning point for political Islam. The Islamic revolution exploded in Iran, provoked by the Western support for the Shah's corrupt regime. The USSR invaded Afghanistan, and a group of bloodthirsty fanatics forcefully seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and held it captive for two weeks. In the wake of all that turmoil, the Sunni version of Islam began to become even more retrograde, while Shia Islam entered an openly militant phase.
In order to fortify its fundamentalist Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia started imposing Shariah ever more strictly. In the meantime, they expanded their financial support for the ultra-conservative Islamists and their respective schools all across the world. The Islamization of the Afghani resistance against Soviet occupation was a plan that was organized, funded and carried out by the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and thus a new fire was inflamed across all South Asia and its adjacent parts of the Middle East. The Afghanistan War turned into the maiden battle for numerous terrorist gangs like the Egyptian branch of Al Qaeda, who were basically the precursors of the Islamic State.
The uprisings of the Arab spring that began in 2011, happened after decades of battle for legitimacy between the dictators and Islamists. There were virtually no other political options in the Arab world. The liberal non-religious forces only played the driving role in the first stage of the Egyptian uprising, but very soon the Islamists pushed them aside into the periphery, and usurped the movement.
Today many Islamists, among them the followers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, openly strive for restoring the Ottoman Caliphate. The more radical groups, like the Salafis, dream of turning the world toward the mores from the time of Muhammad and his followers. Most Muslims genuinely believe that democracy simply means a combination of the will of the majority plus Shariah, which shamelessly advocates gender inequality and discrimination against any non-Muslims.
If we're to face the truth for a minute and stop playing semantic PC games or pretending to be very offended, we'll realize that there isn't a single piece of evidence that political Islam is compatible with modern democracy. From the Taliban Afghanistan to Pakistan, to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia to Iran of the ayatollahs and Sudan, there isn't a single Islamic society that could be qualified as democratic or just. Or at least one to be emulated as an example of good governing of social affairs.
Of course it's wrong to put all Islamic groups in the same pot, although all of them are conservative to one extent or another. For example, terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are drastically different from the Muslim Brotherhood, which renounced violence years ago. Nevertheless, these groups are still part of the same family. And all of them have developed in the Arab world of all places, exactly due to the same detrimental civilizational influence, which has brought the Arab societies to their current predicament. The roots of this unfortunate development run very deep in the devastated, desert land of a tortured civilization, which keeps wandering in the deep dark.
As prominent Lebanese columnist Hisham Melhem says, for decades and generations, the Arabs have remained stuck in the mud. So they'll need a lot of time to find their identity. Sadly, I don't believe that'll happen in our lifetimes. The Arabs I know, have known just one thing. They were being told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists how they should stand at the barricade and defend the Arab world against the foreign barbarians, Soviets, Zionists, crusaders... It didn't occur to them even for a moment that the barbarians were already behind their own fortress walls, speaking their own language, and reigning over their own city.
All hopes that sprouted with the new Arab spring, are now but dead and buried. They didn't turn out as simple to realize as they initially seemed: people expected democratic participation in politics, and restoration of human dignity. But these hopes soon evaporated when they clashed with reality. What remains in their place is civil war, ethnic, religious and regional conflict, and resurging militant absolutism. The archaic, anachronistic Gulf monarchies and emirates alone (plus maybe Tunisia) are still able to withstand that level of disruption. Elsewhere in the Arab world there's essentially no legitimacy left. Instead of rolling up their sleeves and starting to clean up the mess, the Arabs are only digging ever deeper.
It's hard to explain in simple words why all ideologies and political movements that have cast roots on Arab soil for the last century or so, have failed so spectacularly one after another. Arab nationalism has failed - both Nasser's version and the Baathist one. The multiple moderate Islamist movements have failed too. Arab socialism has failed. State-sanctioned oligarchies have failed. Today, most Arab societies are a ruin - unless they're stagnant, retrograde, reactionary Medieval ones.
That the whole area from Basra to the Atlas mountains and from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is drowned in bloodshed between Shia and Sunni, cannot be explained with religious hatred alone. There's a geopolitical war going on, where the Shia world is led by Iran and the Sunni one by Saudi Arabia, along with their respective aides. There's no rational explanation for the horrors in Syria and Iraq. In those two countries the geopolitical, religious and ethnic polarization has become so radical that no one has the faintest idea how these areas could ever be restored with anything remotely resembling statehood - and mind you, those societies are sitting right on top of the cradle of human civilization.
And what about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon and Bahrain? More chaos and crumbling statehood. After the demise of the national states of the past, today the Arab world is dominated by militant Islamism. Under its blows, the diverse secularism of once cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria and Beirut, Cairo and Damascus, is just a shadow of what it used to be. All across the region, Islamism is forcing women to cover their faces and requiring of men to display constant attestations of piety. Intellectuals and people of arts who are unwilling to conform to the new requirements, are mercilessly persecuted. In Egypt for example, there are no longer any good universities, and the newspapers overflow with xenophobia, paranoia and ultra-nationalism.
In other words, the jihadists from ISIL didn't just pop up out of nowhere. They're a symptom of a much deeper ailment, which had started eroding the Arab culture decades ago. In the 20th century, the Arab nationalists, especially the Baathists, were obsessed with the idea of restoring the Arab greatness of old. They believed that the Arab language and Arab culture (and Islam, to a much lesser degree) were sufficient to unite the diverse and often contradictory social, political and cultural tendencies in those societies. Those nationalists refused to recognize that the world was a different place from the one that existed in their dreams. They heavily discriminated against all minorities who were opposed to their ideals. It was under the reign of Arab nationalism that the prototype of the modern tyrant emerged: leaders like Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad. But when it became apparent that they were just as incompetent as the marionette monarchs that they had deposed, these dictators, in turn, essentially paved the way for aggressive Islamism.
"If the problem is the demise of the Arab world, then Islam is the solution" - that's the slogan that has helped the Islamists gain so many followers. In the 80s and 90s, the dictators were desperately clutching at their waning power, and through brutal oppression they tried to preserve it. But the Islamists withstood all persecution, and they constantly crawled back from under the woodwork, assuming all sorts of reincarnations. 1979 was a turning point for political Islam. The Islamic revolution exploded in Iran, provoked by the Western support for the Shah's corrupt regime. The USSR invaded Afghanistan, and a group of bloodthirsty fanatics forcefully seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and held it captive for two weeks. In the wake of all that turmoil, the Sunni version of Islam began to become even more retrograde, while Shia Islam entered an openly militant phase.
In order to fortify its fundamentalist Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia started imposing Shariah ever more strictly. In the meantime, they expanded their financial support for the ultra-conservative Islamists and their respective schools all across the world. The Islamization of the Afghani resistance against Soviet occupation was a plan that was organized, funded and carried out by the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and thus a new fire was inflamed across all South Asia and its adjacent parts of the Middle East. The Afghanistan War turned into the maiden battle for numerous terrorist gangs like the Egyptian branch of Al Qaeda, who were basically the precursors of the Islamic State.
The uprisings of the Arab spring that began in 2011, happened after decades of battle for legitimacy between the dictators and Islamists. There were virtually no other political options in the Arab world. The liberal non-religious forces only played the driving role in the first stage of the Egyptian uprising, but very soon the Islamists pushed them aside into the periphery, and usurped the movement.
Today many Islamists, among them the followers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, openly strive for restoring the Ottoman Caliphate. The more radical groups, like the Salafis, dream of turning the world toward the mores from the time of Muhammad and his followers. Most Muslims genuinely believe that democracy simply means a combination of the will of the majority plus Shariah, which shamelessly advocates gender inequality and discrimination against any non-Muslims.
If we're to face the truth for a minute and stop playing semantic PC games or pretending to be very offended, we'll realize that there isn't a single piece of evidence that political Islam is compatible with modern democracy. From the Taliban Afghanistan to Pakistan, to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia to Iran of the ayatollahs and Sudan, there isn't a single Islamic society that could be qualified as democratic or just. Or at least one to be emulated as an example of good governing of social affairs.
Of course it's wrong to put all Islamic groups in the same pot, although all of them are conservative to one extent or another. For example, terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are drastically different from the Muslim Brotherhood, which renounced violence years ago. Nevertheless, these groups are still part of the same family. And all of them have developed in the Arab world of all places, exactly due to the same detrimental civilizational influence, which has brought the Arab societies to their current predicament. The roots of this unfortunate development run very deep in the devastated, desert land of a tortured civilization, which keeps wandering in the deep dark.
As prominent Lebanese columnist Hisham Melhem says, for decades and generations, the Arabs have remained stuck in the mud. So they'll need a lot of time to find their identity. Sadly, I don't believe that'll happen in our lifetimes. The Arabs I know, have known just one thing. They were being told by both the Arab nationalists and the Islamists how they should stand at the barricade and defend the Arab world against the foreign barbarians, Soviets, Zionists, crusaders... It didn't occur to them even for a moment that the barbarians were already behind their own fortress walls, speaking their own language, and reigning over their own city.