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ARAB INTELLECTUALS: A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS
Saad A Sowayan
The Arab masses seem to be putting too much faith in Arab
intellectuals to deliver the Arab World from its quagmire of
political malaise. The general feeling among most Arabs is that
it is the sole responsibility of the intellectuals to speak out
against all sorts of oppression and injustice, and offer
themselves as fodder for change and revolution, as if martyrdom
is the exclusive privilege of the intellectuals. While everybody
remains silent, it is the intellectuals who are expected to
single handedly combat the fundamentalists and extremists and
alert the governments to their danger. This is an overestimation
of the social role and capabilities of intellectuals.
If, as an intellectual, you happen to be invited by one of the
business people to a weekend soiree, you will find yourself in
the odd position of having to defend yourself, along with your
fellow intellectuals, for not raising your voice against the
government and for remaining free still and not yet being thrown
in jail for expressing opposition to the establishment. One of
the people present, after taking two sips from his glass of
expensive scotch and gulping a handful of roasted peanuts, would
come up to you to reprimand you for your pacifism and give you a
long harangue about the necessity of reform. You look at his
manicured, shiny face and his stiffly starched headdress and
wonder to your self: Is this guy really serious? You leave the
soiree a bit tipsy but hopeful and full of enthusiasm. The next
day you write up a petition addressed to the king or president,
whoever happened to be the head of your state and whichever
happened to be the system of your government, asking for some
moderate measures of liberal reforms. Then, you take the
petition to your fellow intellectuals for signature assuring
them that some of the most important and influential business
people would cosign it. After that, you take the petition to the
same business people who two nights ago were full of talk about
change and reform. As it turns out, every one of them has his
own excuse and ÔgoodÕ reason for not signing. You decide to go
ahead anyway with your petition. As a result, you and the
handful of your colleagues who signed with you are either thrown
in jail or fired from your jobs or your passports are withdrawn
from you to prevent you from leaving the country or, in case the
language of the petition is not too bold and does not deserve a
jail sentence, you are prevented from ever appearing on TV or
writing in any newspaper to express any opinion on any subject
whatsoever. Any false charge could be trumped up and lodged
against you to justify the sentence, from political treason to
religious blasphemy. Yet, none of those manicured businessmenn
would dare ruffle his starched headdress and come to your
rescue. It is only then that you realize that their pompous
harangues about reform were meant only to clear their conscious
for being so wealthy despite their illiteracy and to prove to
their own satisfaction that members of the educated class are
losers and failures which shows that education is useless
anyway.
Let us now move to the other side of the fence and tell a
different story. Suppose that one of the religious extremists
grabbed a microphone after Friday prayers in any mosque and
started a sort of soapbox sermon on the moral ills of the time.
Overcome with zeal, he would most likely step over all bounds in
seeing heresy everywhere and accusing everybody of infidelity
and pointing to government officials as cohorts of the devil for
remaining silent while they see all these travesties. He might
even challenge the sovereignty of the state and exhort everybody
to take the law into their own hands and rise up in the name of
the true faith to correct such flagrant transgressions against
the Lord. If authorities find the guts to arrest him, multitudes
would flood the offices of government officials demanding his
release. If his sentence is prolonged they will see to it that
his family is well taken care off. Websites will be created to
collect signatures for his release and donations for his family.
When he comes out of jail, he will be received by the people as
a conquering hero. On the other hand, the other fellow, our
friend the intellectual cum liberal, will be avoided like a
camel with scabies after serving his sentence and being
released.
Actually, governments are not to be blamed for being more
lenient with the fundamentalist and not so lenient with
liberals. What they are doing is the political thing to do. This
is the nature of the power beast. Politicians take note only of
those who have backing behind them, those who express the
interest of a class, a block of constituents. The fundamentalist
discourse, in its emphasis on the importance of religion in
life, is, more or less, expressing the interest of the clerical
class, which is quite sizable; from callers to prayers, to
leaders of prayers, to judges in courts, to teachers and
students in religious institutions, etc, etc. The clerics are
the only well established professional class in the Arab World
with historical roots, which go a long way back in history, with
well articulated discourse, substantial literature and a broad
public base, not to mention that practically all endowments and
philanthropic contributions in the Arab World go to religious
functions and institutions with only very negligible share
directed towards scientific research, cultural activities, the
humanities and the arts. So what if a handful of intellectuals
go round talking to a score of audience in few soirees a week!
The clerics meet with millions of devotees five times a day. If
the government takes any harsh measure against a cleric or a
fundamentalist it would look like as if it were taking that
measure against the religion of the people. Yet, it could easily
jail liberals under any pretext and no one would dare or care to
raise a finger or express support or give a helping hand.
The main reason the liberal voice in the Arab World is powerless
and ineffectual is because it does not express the interest of
any social class. At the close of the 18th and beginning of the
19th centuries, the liberal voices in Europe were expressing the
interest of the rising class of the mercantilists and the
bourgeoisie in their struggle against the nobility and the
feudal lords. Without the material support and political backing
of the merchant class, liberalism in Europe might not have
achieved such tremendous success. Before the rise of the
merchant class in Europe, many reformers, from John Wyclif to
John Huss, were burnt at the stake with no one rushing to take
their side. We should also remember that the timing of the
reformation movement of Martin Luther was the secret for its
success. It came at a time when the German provinces were
anxious to throw the yoke of the Vatican and wanted to keep the
taxes and revenues of their provinces to themselves instead of
sending it to Rome. We might say the same thing regarding the
Wahhabi movement. It succeded because it managed to recruit a
power base, that of ad-DeÕiyyah.
The roots of the European merchant class go back to guild
associations, a professional class independent from both church
and state. The merchant class in the Middle East, and Arab World
in particular, especially in the Gulf Region, has a completely
different story to tell. Let us start with the prophet. His
tribe, Quraish is a merchant tribe. Even before then, the
temples in the ancient Middle Eastern States have always been
associated with merchant activities. Sacred precincts in the
East were meant to be safe areas to engage in trade. The spread
of sufi zawaya and the religion of Islam in Africa and the Far
East are associated with the itinerant merchants. Furthermore,
all traditional sultanates, emirates, chieftains and peti-states
in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf Region were established by
merchant families. The revenue from merchandise gives them their
material base, while their alliance with the clerical class give
their political and legal authority the necessary legitimacy.
This shows the political and religious roots of mercantilism in
the Arab World and the intertwining of the merchant class with
the ruling class and the religious class. This leaves the
intellectuals and liberals out in the cold with no role to play,
at least up till now.
Being in league with the ruling class, any liberalization of the
laissez faire type might hurt the merchants more than benefits
them, since it could break their monopolies. Also, since they
draw their wealth mainly from trade and lucrative government
contracts, more than from industry or entrepreneurship, they
have no interest in scientific research and technological
development. As for clerics, their hostility towards natural and
physical sciences and secular knowledge in general need no
proof. In such social formation there is no room for any
intellectual enterprise.
What is needed is not only a separation between church and state
in the Arab World, but rather to disengage the ruling class, the
merchant class and the clerical class from one another.
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In short, Arab intellectuals enjoy neither power base nor
popular support. Feeble and impotent as they are, many are the
odds they face and insurmountable are the obstacles preventing
them from fulfilling their mission of enlightenment. They have
to combat outmoded but well entrenched traditional values,
values which are congruous with the conservative outlook of the
masses and which are organically linked to the interests of the
ruling elite and religious establishment. Media and educational
institutions which are financed by the government and dominated
by the clerical class are diverted from their true functions of
raising consciousness and providing useful information and
education and turned into machineries for the dissemination of
such conservative discourse, a discourse revolving around
certain interconnected traditional norms which don theological
garb in order to elevate them from the status of social norms to
that of religious principles. Such discourse is dominating
academic institutions, professional associations and literary
clubs which leaves no podium for any true scientific,
philosophical, inquisitive pursuit of true, objective knowledge.
Appeal to such traditional norms as a way to run a modern state
may seem anachronistic, but they are politically useful because
they sell very well with the great majority of the general
public and semi-literate masses, not to mention the fact that
many policy makers and people in the government are themselves
people with traditional mode of thinking and meager education
who sincerely believe in the efficacy and merits of such
methods.
Allow me to spell out some of these norms in order to show how
they interrelate with one another to form a comprehensive value
system and how, in turn, this value system serves to intermesh
political discourse with religious discourse and thus create an
intellectual climate that is conducive neither to progressive
change nor to individual freedom and innovation. I will show to
what extent such traditional norms and values color and
influence political behavior.
I will start with the notion of unitarianism at-tawHied, since
this is a pivotal concept, both religiously and politically.
Unitarianism is a religious doctrine. But it is also a state of
mind amenable to political manipulation. It is a mode of
consciousness shaped by the interweaving of cultural values and
religious conviction. The unitarian view spelled over from
religious to political discourse and was generalized to
encompass all aspects of mundane worldly existence. It is
manifested not only in the ethical and religious sphere but also
in the socio-political domain.
Unitarianism gives room neither for rational choice nor for
individual freedom. According to the unitarian view, the society
is held together not so much by complimentary associations and
mutual interdependencies, but by binding sentiments and common
belief, a collective consciousness. It is based not on
utilitarian and expedient considerations, but on shared moral
principles, on the organization of human sentiments into
implicit convictions. Collective sentiments embrace the greater
part of the individual sentiments. No matter where your mind or
taste leads you, you are not allowed to leave the fold or swerve
from the right path followed by the community of the faithful.
Innovation and variation are suppressed and dissident voices are
stifled. This leaves no room whatsoever for differences in
opinion or in life styles. Even dress codes and personal
appearance become regimented.
This submergence of individual personality in the group limits
the possibility of free choice and individual preference. If any
one ever makes the slightest attempt to assert his uniqueness or
individuality, he will be subject to censorship. Any alternative
is resisted and treated not as a licit substitute stemming from
a rational free choice, but as a detrimental antithesis of the
fundamental truth of the archetype. Any change is a
deterioration from a pristine, original archetype. The archetype
is a model to be emulated and reproduced, not dissected or
scrutinized.
Such insular mode of thinking is typically characteristic of
archaic, pre-industrial, pre-scientific societies, which are
generally small, isolated and homogeneous. Such societies are
characterized by a static conception of the universe. Not only
do they censure individual differences but they also do not
tolerate temporal social change. Social change is not progress
and evolution. It is decay and degeneration, always for the
worst. According to this conception, the further we turn back in
time the closer we get to the ideal golden age of pure
innocence.
In a traditional society, political, economic, social and all
other forms of relationships, with all that is incumbent upon
them in terms of rights and obligations, are couched in familial
and kinship terms. The whole community is seen as one extended
family. The jural aspects of the relationships and obligations
of citizens to one another are articulated in familial terms and
tinged with familial coloring which shows that we have not yet
completely moved from the status stage to the contract stage, a
la Sir Henry Main. This, in turn, has its impact on political
behavior. To fudge the political and merge it with the social
relieves the state from elaborating viable and efficient
political institutions with clearly defined responsibilities and
legally accountable apparatus. The relationship between ruler
and ruled is not governed by a social contract with clearly
stated and mutually binding legal codes and constitutional
precepts so much as by mutual obligations vaguely couched in
familial and paternal expressions. This leaves the citizen
perplexed. He is living in an impersonal crowded urban setting,
yet he is supposed to operate and run his daily business
according to rural, traditional, small community, face-to-face
principles. To deal with such challenges, which are compounded
by institutional inefficiency, the citizen is forced to reduce
all jural and administrative problems he faces to the level of
personal issues. He attaches himself as the clientele of an
influential figure with wide network and good connections who
would be his patron, or waastah, to look after him, further his
interests and help him get what actually should be his right as
a citizen.
Furthermore, the familial conception of society has its impact
on how the role of public media is perceived. Public media means
public exposure, which would violate the concept of sitir. The
concept of sitir is an important concept in traditional Arab
culture, which is hard to translate into English. It is related
to discretion, privacy and cover up. When you pray to Allah to
grant you sitir, you are hoping that you live your life
honorably and decently without ever being exposed to public
shame, disgrace or embarrassment. Public exposure could reveal
your weaknesses. You should never reveal your vices, nor your
physical and material weaknesses. You should always appear to
the outside world as an honorable man of substantial means and
strength. That is why you should walk in the streets wearing
expensive clothes, even if you have to do it on an empty
stomach, because people could see what you are wearing but not
what you have eaten.
Therefore, the media should always be laudatory, never critical.
Outward criticism of any state official is conceived as parallel
to showing disobedience or disrespect to a family authority
figure. Criticism could convey the wrong message to the outside
world, that the house is divided and, by implication, weak. Any
complaint or objection should be communicated to the ruler in
his majlis or submitted in a written letter addressed discretely
to the proper channels without broadcasting it to the outside
world. A nation, like a family, should appear strong and united
behind the ruler, like members of a family behind a patriarch.
The ruler is like a patriarch and the people are his children.
This is aptly expressed by one of the princess when the three
Saudi reformists were released from jail at the inauguration of
king Abdullah. The prince justified their release by saying that
they were children who erred against their father and their
father forgives them.
What I have said so far is intricately interlinked with another
widely circulated concept that has been gaining grounds lately
because it has proven to be politically expedient. This is the
concept of khusousiyyah.
khusousiyyah has a broad semantic field and a wide range of
different shades of meaning, among them: authenticity,
uniqueness, distinctiveness, peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, and many
more. But, as a political slogan, it is an ill-defined concept,
which is used as a bulwark against change by conservatives who
want to maintain the status quo.
The obscurity and indeterminacy of meaning makes the word an
ideal trump card to be used when you want to silence the
opponent and win the argument by fiat through appeal to
sentimental rather than logical grounds. The concept of
khusousiyyah is so loose, any form of oppression, extremism or
chauvinism can be justified in the name of preserving and
maintaining our khusousiyyah. The word could be used to defend
many abuses such as oppression of women. Democracy and human
rights go counter to our khusousiyyah. Satellites, the internet
and all modern means of communication are resisted because they
would impinge on our private culture and dilute our khusousiyyah.
Streamlining of the country with the rest of the world is
resisted because it means the giving up of khusousiyyah. When
liberal voices are raised demanding change they are silenced in
the name of khusousiyyah.
The ruling elite and the religious establishment both are allied
in their championing of khusousiyyah. They use it, each in its
own way, to entrench their positions and strengthen their hold
on the populace. But this alliance between the political and the
religious establishments does not always work out smoothly.
Considerations of expediency, realpolitik and pressures,
internal and external, may force the political establishment
sometimes to make calculated concessions. This offers the
religious establishment the opportunity to present itself to the
masses and pose as the real champion of khusousiyyah. Thus,
khusousiyyah becomes a political commodity that goes for the
bidder who offers the highest price, in terms of more extreme
rhetoric and more fundamentalist discourse. That is why the
government can not have its cake and eat too. Relying on the
religious establishment for legitimacy entails succumbing to
their fundamentalist ideology.
Even people with no vested political interest in maintaining
khusousiyyah adhere to the concept as a self defense mechanism
against the sudden onslaught of the modern world which barged
unexpectedly as an uninvited guest on their private world and
their private homes.
There is no objections against using khusousiyyah in the
anthropological sense of cultural relativity, meaning that each
culture is unique to itself, or when it is used as a symbol of
national identity to promote national cohesion and instill pride
and self-respect. But when the concept is used as a political
and ideological club to be weilded against progressive thinking,
then it becomes very harmful indeed.
Let me conclude by asserting that the point of this presentation
is not to make a political statement or to lodge a protest
against the status que. My purpose, which I hope that I have
managed to accomplish, is to present you with a detached
socio-political assessment of what is happening and why it is
happening. I only hope that this is a cultural stage we will
soon pass by. After all, we have to keep in mind that the idea
of cultural evolution and social progress, as well as the idea
of individual liberty, are late discoveries in the intellectual
development of mankind. Less than two centuries ago, Europe was
still debating merits of the ancients versus merits of the
moderns. Individual liberty and freedom of choice are the
products of the principle of laissez-faire, which is concomitant
with capitalism and market economy, themselves products of the
industrial revolution, itself a product of the scientific
revolution. So, may be before we clamor for individual freedom
and liberty we should work towards reaching scientific and
intellectual freedom. |
