- I- The Big Change in Islamic Societies.
-
- A comparison between Islamic and Arab societies today
and those of a century ago reveals how much more widespread the mentality
of violence, has become in today,s societies. But the real danger lies
less in the mentality of violence that has come to permeate many, if not
all, sectors of Islamic and Arab societies than in the spread of the culture
that is conducive to its growth and development. This culture is what spawns
militants who promote the mentality of violence and the general climate
that allows it to take hold. I believe five factors are responsible for
the phenomenon: political oppression (at the hands of autocratic forms
of government marked by a lack of democracy); the rise of the Wahhabi brand
of Islam (along with the retreat of the tolerant model which had prevailed
for centuries); the spread of tribal values which came with the spread
of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam; educational systems that are completely
divorced from the age; and, finally, widespread corruption, which is the
inevitable result of political oppression.
-
- Possibly the most dangerous of the many negative effects
of political oppression is that it kills social mobility, in the sense
that it denies the best elements in society the opportunity to rise to
leading positions in various fields. The death of a healthy process of
social mobility makes for a static situation in which inept and mediocre
elements come to occupy top positions by dint of accepting, indeed, of
supporting, oppression and through unquestioning loyalty to their superiors.
As oppression kills social mobility, so does the lack of social mobility
kill competence in all fields. Oppression produces followers, not competent
people, with the result that widespread mediocrity becomes the norm. This
produces a general climate of despair, and from this comes the mentality
of violence, with its attendant devaluation of the value of human life,
whether of oneself or of others. In other words, Arab and Islamic societies
in general are today caught in an equation which I call the equation of
destruction,: autocracy kills social mobility; lack of social mobility
destroys competence at all societal levels; lack of competence at all societal
levels creates a powerful evil energy which is despair; despair breeds
a mentality of violence, cheapens the value of human life and creates a
desire for revenge.
-
- Over the last four decades, many have written about the
rising violence in a large number of Islamic and Arab societies; strangely
enough, none of them used the terms competent, or incompetent, in their
analysis of this phenomenon. This is as true of eminent professors in top-notch
universities, like Harvard,s Samuel P. Huntington, as it is of journalists.
I have never come across this key word in all my readings on the subject.
This calls to mind a talk I gave a few years ago to MBA students at the
American University in Cairo, in which I remarked that in hundreds of conversations
I had had with various interlocutors about public figures, both local and
international, the word competence never came up. It is an incomprehensible
omission, especially for a management man like myself, who knows that problems
are created by lack of competence while success in all its forms comes
from competence. In fact, I believe the despair felt by so many in Islamic
and Arab societies, the sense of helplessness and hopelessness that breeds
anger then violence, stems from the fact that these societies are run by
human resources selected not for their competence but for their subservience
and allegiance. After all, competence, as defined by modern management
science, is of no great concern to an autocratic political system.
-
- Educational systems that are out of step with the age
are a vital link in the chain of destruction. Educational systems in most
Islamic and Arab societies encourage insularity and reinforce a sense of
isolation from the rest of humanity, promote fanaticism and lay down, without
any scientific basis, religious frameworks for struggles that are purely
political. By invoking religious texts taken out of context they not only
promote intolerance, non-acceptance of the Other,, and a lack of belief
in pluralism, but consecrate the lowly status of women. Moreover, most
of the curricula are designed to develop a mentality of answering, rather
than of questioning,, in a world where progress and development are driven
by the dynamics of questioning. In most Islamic and Arab societies, educational
programmes fail to instill in the minds of the young that progress, is
a human process, in the sense that its mechanisms are neither eastern nor
western, but universal. This is borne out by the fact that the list of
most advanced countries in the world includes some that are Western/Christian,
like the United States and Western Europe, and others with a Japanese,
Chinese or Muslim background (like Malaysia). There is a clear and growing
tendency in the humanities and social sciences to disengage, as it were,
from the common fund of human experience, the cumulative legacy built up
over the ages by various civilizations. In a lecture I delivered recently
at a British University, I said that in the sixties I had read most of
the classics, from Homer to Sartre, passing through hundreds of names,
languages and backgrounds. Like many of my contemporaries, I read these
works in Arabic. The unfettered access we had at the time to the timeless
classics of world literature linked us to humanity in a way that is inconceivable
today, with the paucity of translations in the cultural arena in Arab and
Islamic countries. My audience at that lecture were amazed to learn that,
along with others of my generation, I had read Aeschylus, Aristophanes,
Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Voltaire,
Jean Jacques Rousseau, all the Russian classics, Flaubert, Balzac, Bernard
Shaw, Pirandello, Albert Camus, Steinbeck, Faulkner and the gems of German
philosophy in Arabic, translated by people predominantly from Egypt, Syria
and Lebanon, and published mainly in Egypt and Lebanon. Today, the gap
between the minds of young people in Islamic and Arab societies and the
masterpieces of human creativity has increased dramatically. In addition,
the new generations have become increasingly local,, setting themselves
still further apart from humanity and increasing the mentality of violence
and its culture.
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- II - Muslims and the Clash of Civilizations.
-
- The mentality of violence is the product of internal
factors, a variable that has emerged only in the last four decades, and
its inclusion as a constant in the clash of civilizations, paradigm is
not only forced but belongs more to the realm of science fiction than political
analysis. A case in point is the famous book by Samuel P. Huntington, whose
theory is closely linked to the issue of mentality of violence. First published
as an article in 1992 under the title "Clash of Civilizations? it
was expanded into a book and published the following year under the same
title but without the question mark. The significance of the omission will
not be lost on the reader. The book was a publishing event, selling more
copies and provoking more controversy than any other book that year (with
the exception of fiction bestsellers). While I cannot pass the same kind
of sweeping judgment against the author, his motives, aims and intentions
as those passed against him in various parts of the Arab and Islamic world,
I will say that I found the book to have three major flaws:
-
- ¨ The first is that the author talks of Islam as
though the Wahhabi model is the only Islam. In fact, Wahhabism was not
a major trend in Islam until the alliance that took place between Mohamed
ibn-Abdul Wahab and Mohamed ibn-Saud in the second half of the eighteenth
century. Prior to that, there were ideas similar to the Wahhabi interpretation
of Islam but they were completely marginal. Mainstream Islam was quite
distinct from the Wahabbi interpretation of Islam and its culture. The
only relationship between the Ottoman Empire, which represented Islam politically
as a superpower for several centuries, and Wahhabism was one of extreme
animosity. I would have been willing to accept most of what Huntington
wrote about the probable clash between the West and Islam if he had used
the term Wahhabi Islam, instead of Islam. I can only conclude that Huntington
is not very well versed in the history and factors which led to the rise
of the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.
-
- ¨ The second is that he did not present any evidence
to support his theory of an impending clash between the West and what he
calls Confucian, societies, making the theory closer to fiction, specifically
the writings of H.G. Wells, than to political analysis. It also owes much
to Noam Chomsky,s equally unfounded theory that the United States needs
an enemy to survive, and that this role was filled by the eastern bloc
from 1945 to 1990. Following the collapse of communism, Chomsky believes
Islam is now the prime candidate for the role! But if so, how to explain
the enormous progress made by the United States between 1500 and 1900,
without any external conflicts and without any clear enemy during this
period of the development and completion of the American Dream? How to
explain that despite Winston Churchill,s efforts from 1939 to 1941 to convince
the United States to join the war on the side of the Allies, it was only
after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 that his efforts were
crowned with success? How could the United States have resisted the opportunity
to benefit from the existence of a ready-made enemy which, according to
Chomsky, it needed for its very survival?
-
- ¨ The third is that he did not devote enough space
in his book to the largest conflict in the history of humanity, World War
II, which was fought between forces belonging to the same Western civilization.
It was also a conflict within the Christian world, but nobody ever mentioned
religion as a factor in this huge conflict, which was primarily a conflict
between European Fascism and European democracies.
-
- III- The Mentality of Violence . and the Games Nations
Play!
-
- Although I believe the mentality of violence is caused
primarily by internal factors, I also believe that an external factor contributed
to its spread, namely, the misguided attempts by some to use the forces
produced by the mentality of violence for political purposes. A case in
point is the support offered by the India office of MI6 to a group that
was attempting at the beginning of the twentieth century to unify the Arabian
Peninsula under a political system deriving its legitimacy from a Wahhabi
interpretation of Islam. The Najdi movement, known as the Ikhwan or brotherhood,
was a prime example of this trend during the twenties of the last century.
King Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud, founder of the third incarnation of the Saudi
state, was forced to go to war against them after they accused him of deviating
from the tenets of real Islam by accepting such Western abominations as
radios, cars, telephones, etc. During the same period, Egypt saw an alliance
formed between the British and the monarchy, who both had an interest in
creating an alternative political entity, deriving its popularity from
the popularity of religion in Egypt, to counterbalance the influential
Wafd Party, which spearheaded the Egyptian struggle for a Constitution,
a parliamentary life, and independence. Forged in secret, the alliance
is now known to any student of Egypt,s modern history. An example of the
dangerous game politicians play with the mentality of violence in the hope
that they can use it to further their own ends, the game was played again
in Egypt in the nineteen seventies and repeated by the United States in
Afghanistan. All these cases illustrate how an external factor helped the
mentality of violence reach such a level of political and military growth.
Had it not been for the Cold War and for the short-sighted belief by some
that religion could be used as a winning card in the confrontation, the
mentality of violence could never have reached its present proportions.
Thus although it is largely a product of internal factors like political
oppression, lack of social mobility, disappearance of competence, prevalence
of despair, reinforced by obsolete educational and information systems,
the mentality of violence was given a huge boost by an external factor
which can only be described as the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth
century.
-
- IV- Implications of the Cairo/Al-Dir,iyah Confrontation.
-
- In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Mohamed
Ali, who introduced Egypt and the entire region to the modern age, sent
a huge army to the Arabian Peninsula. Led first by the Egyptian ruler,s
son Tousson then by his son Ibrahim, the army had as its objective the
destruction of a newly established state in the Eastern Province of the
Arabian Peninsula. Based in Najd, it was governed according to the strict
Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In 1818, Ibrahim Pasha defeated the enemy,
destroyed their capital, Al-Dir,iyah, and captured their leader, who was
later executed in Istanbul. The war was an expression of the confrontation
between two very different models of Islam: the Egyptian-Turkish model,
based on an understanding of Islam that was shared by the Muslims of the
Levant on one side versus the Wahhabi model on the other. But although
the moderate, tolerant, mainstream version of Islam, which accepted to
coexist in peace with others and was not pathologically opposed to progress
and modernity, emerged victorious in that particular round of its confrontation
with the forces of obscurantism, it was later forced to retreat before
the internal factors I have previously mentioned, namely, oppression, absence
of social mobility, spread of incompetence, despair, reactionary educational
systems and corruption.
-
- As to the other version of Islam, it found unprecedented
opportunities to spread its uncompromising message to every corner of the
world. International conditions (and lack of vision) allowed what had once
been an obscure sect confined behind the sand dunes of Najd to impose itself
on the world stage and boldly proclaim its brand of Islam as the one and
only true Islam. As the drama played out, some of the spectators chose
to look the other way because the sword-wielding hero of the piece was
playing the role required of him at the time. Thus they failed to realize
that the hero was no longer sticking to the script set for him, and was
now playing a much more central and dangerous role.
-
- V- A Movement Bred in the Isolation of the Desert.
-
- The man who founded Wahhabism was not a theologian but
a proselyter who was determined to convert the faithful to his harsh brand
of Islam. Intellectually close to the dialectical Islamic theologians who
asserted the primacy of tradition (naql) over reason (aql), Mohamed ibn-Abdul
Wahab was a disciple of ibn-Taymiyah, a strict traditionalist who allowed
little scope for reason or independent thinking. He was also a product
of his geographical environment, a remote outpost of history. Unlike Egypt,
Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, where ancient civilizations had flourished
and made their mark on human history, or places like Dubai and Hijaz, which
lay on trade routes and dealt extensively with the outside world, the desert
of Najd in the Eastern Province of what is now Saudi Arabia had no civilization
to speak of before Islam. Nor did it ever become a cultural centre like
the capitals of the Caliphate, Medina, Damascus and Baghdad. Thanks to
its arid, barren landscape, Najd remained a cultural backwater, its sole
contribution to the arts a traditional form of poetry that spoke of narrow
tribal matters.
-
- The harsh and unforgiving environment in which the Najdis
lived explains why Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab found a receptive audience for
the equally harsh and unforgiving brand of Islam he preached. The same
environment that produced the founder of Wahhabism later produced the radical
Ikhwan movement which challenged the authority of King Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud.
In the nineteen twenties, the king took on the Ikhwan, who were openly
accusing him of deviating from the true faith. When he returned to Riyadh
after joining Hijaz to his kingdom, the Ikhwan said he had left on a camel
and come back in an American car! This was just one of many clashes between
the movement and the king over such issues as whether the radio was sinful
or the telephone an invention of the devil, in short, over any of the fruits
of modernity which threatened their fundamentalist vision of the world.
It is a vision that can only be understood by studying what is known as
the secret sects of Islam (radical fringe movements that never became part
of mainstream Islam), as well as the message of Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab,
the product of many factors, including the sociological and geopolitical
environment of the deserts of Najd. These factors allowed the Wahhabis,
after they invaded Hijaz, to impose their austere understanding of religion
throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Among other things, they banned headstones
and any structures identifying burial sites, insisting on unmarked graves
flush with the land. They combated Sufism in Mecca and elsewhere as contrary
to the teachings of Islam. They even entered into an armed clash with the
Egyptian mahmil, a splendidly decorated litter on which the Egyptians sent
a new cover for the Ka,bah every year. The mahmil ceremony was a merry
occasion celebrated by the Egyptians with their traditional love of music,
dancing and revelry. For the Najdis, who had launched their puritanical
revival movement to purge Islam of what they saw as deviations from the
straight and true path of orthodoxy, such unseemly displays of levity could
not be tolerated.
-
- What I want to cast light on here is that, throughout
its history, the desert wasteland of the Arabian Peninsula,s Eastern Province
had suffered greatly from its geography. However, it contained the richest
oil fields and, following the oil price boom that turned the desert kingdom
into a major financial power, it was inevitable that this part of the world
should try and market its ideas. This it did with missionary zeal in the
second half of the twentieth century. With a virtually endless supply of
funds at their disposal, the Wahhabis were able to successfully propagate
their model of Islam throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Disillusioned
populations, facing massive internal problems caused by political oppression,
lack of social mobility, widespread corruption, institutions run without
any competence and deteriorating educational systems were easy prey, and
mainstream Islam gradually lost ground to the austere, puritanical Wahhabi
model that was now presenting itself as the one and only true Islam.
-
- In short, while under non-Wahhabi Islam the Muslim communities
in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey were forward-looking, in tune with
the times and living in harmony with large Christian and Jewish communities,
it is inconceivable that Wahhabism would have tolerated the kind of cosmopolitan
and tolerant societies that flourished in Alexandria, Cairo, Istanbul,
Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo at the turn of the twentieth century. On the
contrary, the Najdi version of Islam exhorts its followers to remain in
a constant confrontation with others, with the age and with modernity.
Under Wahhabism, the word jihad is interpreted as the need to carry a sword
at all times, although mainstream Islam for centuries understood it as
requiring them to resort to force only to defend themselves from outside
aggression. Even semantically, the word jihad is totally unrelated to the
notion of armed violence. Mainstream Islam also accepted the possibility
of Muslims merging with the rest of humanity (especially before the chauvinistic
tribal culture of Najd gained ground), while Wahhabism regards this as
impossible and unacceptable. Indeed, it is regarded as synonymous with
subservience, a term that is widely used by those whose thinking is shaped
by the Wahabbi model of Islam. If Noam Chomsky,s theory is valid, it applies
just as much to the Wahhabis who need a strong enemy in order to survive.
-
- VI- The Fall of the Oppressors and the Emergence of the
Sword.
-
- Over the last few decades, many Islamic societies were
subjected to various types of despots who ruled their countries with an
iron fist in the context of widespread autocracy. This led in many cases
to the downward spiral I described previously. Oppression killed social
mobility; the absence of social mobility led to a widespread lack of competence;
lack of competence resulted in the collapse of all institutions; this engendered
feelings of despair and rage out of which was born the mentality of violence,
that came to permeate many of these societies. The problem is that no sooner
are there changes that cause the downfall of the despotic ruler in these
societies (Suharto in Indonesia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq) than there emerge
on the scene symbols of the Wahabbi interpretation of Islam putting themselves
forward as saviours! Some people are fooled into thinking that they are
the only political power produced by those societies. There is a compound
error here: what produces this state of affairs is the despotic rulers
and their autocratic regimes that kill social mobility, prevent the growth
of civil society, generalize incompetence and divide political life into
two levels: a level above ground (which belongs exclusively to the rulers
and their cohorts) and a level below ground (which belongs to the symbols
of Wahabbi Islam, who receive the best possible training in the art of
growing underground in secrecy). As soon as the despot is removed, the
only political force which existed underground emerges and, in the absence
of civil society, the lack of social mobility and the prevalence of incompetence,
the stage is set for a new set of oppressors who are at the same time incompetent.
They will lead their societies to greater depths of backwardness, distance
them still further from the modern age and sink them even deeper into social
problems.
-
- In short, both sets of oppressors, those operating above
ground and those belonging to clandestine underground organizations, are
products of the equation to which I have repeatedly returned in this article:
an autocratic political system that paralyses social mobility and allows
incompetent elements to take over the running of society,s institutions,
thereby causing standards to deteriorate, despair to prevail and the mentality
of violence to take hold. The educational and media institutions are incapable
of righting this tragedy, because they too have been corrupted at the hands
of incompetent elements. A valid question here is why this is the only
model that emerges whenever an oppressive regime falls in a Muslim or Arab
country. The answer is simply that this is a natural result of the widespread
despair felt by those living under an autocratic regime that allows no
political activities above ground, so that the only organizations that
can survive in its shadow are those operating underground. The cure must
start with the first link in the chain, not the last.
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- VII- Muslim Societies a Hundred Years Ago.
-
- To disprove the allegation that the violent groups and
trends which turn their backs on modernity and call for a return to the
Middle Ages are the true representatives of Islam, one has only to consider
how some of the principal Islamic societies were functioning at the turn
of the twentieth century. Countries like Egypt, Greater Syria (which included
Lebanon at the time) and Turkey were models of tolerance, their majority
Muslim populations living peacefully with minorities of other faiths. Famously
cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria, Beirut and Cairo were home to a wide
diversity of minorities. Acceptance of the Other, and of modernity, as
well as a hunger for the great masterpieces of human creativity were features
shared by all these societies. Intellectuals translated Homer, the plays
of Ancient Greece, the best of modern European literature and the great
philosophers like Descartes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, Locke, Hobbs,
Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Although they were in complete
harmony with the scientific, philosophical and artistic consequences of
the Renaissance, they retained their identity as Egyptians, Turks and Syrians.
It was a time when Muslims saw no contradiction between their religious
faith and their enthusiasm for the material and cultural fruits of European
civilization.
-
- The peaceful and harmonious coexistence of devout Muslims
with the religious minorities living in their midst, their equally harmonious
relationship with the fruits of Western civilization proves conclusively
that the adherents of real Islam are not violent fanatics and that mainstream
Islam has nothing to do with the Wahhabi model of militant Islam, whose
success in winning over converts is due to the declining conditions in
many Islamic societies (an autocratic political system leads to the total
paralysis of social mobility which leads to the spread of incompetence
which leads to a drop in standards which leads to despair which, in the
context of backward educational systems, creates the mentality of violence
and a cultural climate that accepts it.)
-
- Thus it is not the Islamic system of belief that leads
inevitably to violence and clashes with the Other., Violence and fanaticism
are features of only one fringe sect that was virtually unknown outside
the deserts of Najd as recently as one century ago. Non-Wahhabi mainstream
Islam prevailed in Islamic societies until two cataclysmic developments
forced it to retreat: the first was the eruption of the violent model of
Islam from behind the sand dunes, the second the decline in living standards
in many Islamic societies which allowed it to spread.
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- VIII- The Crisis Facing Non-Wahabbi Islam.
-
- There are no permanent social phenomena; they are the
result of circumstances and factors. Therefore the fear that non-Wahabbi
Islam, which was the main trend among the majority of Muslims for several
centuries, is being edged out of its central role is a legitimate one.
The moderate brand of Islam will not be reinstated in its former position
unless the factors making up the equation of internal collapse to which
Islamic societies are exposed are solved (starting with autocracy to the
mentality of violence to lack of competence to declining living standards
to despair to the collapse of educational systems) and unless the outside
world in general and the world,s only superpower in particular realize
that adopting hostile stands against Islam and Muslims indiscriminately
can only provoke negative reactions. This is all the more true given that
they were partners with those responsible for the downward spiral and helped
bring about the series of external factors that allowed the cycle of violence
to attain its present level. Humanity,s failure to support and reinforce
the gentle, non-militant brand of Islam to which most Islamic societies
until recently belonged by helping remove the internal and external landmines,
which eroded the ability of those societies to stand up to the assault
of militant Islam is a crime committed by humanity against itself, a crime
for which we shall all pay an exorbitant price. I fear that the primary
cause of this is the infantile culture, of the world,s foremost superpower.
The United States, despite its great achievements in tens of fields suffers
from what I call in my lectures the "cultural infantilism of American
policies. If we liken humanity to a body, the spinal cord of that body
would be culture, a rare commodity among most citizens of the United States
and a large portion of its intellectuals. The only explanation for this
is the gap between material/scientific/technological advances and cultural
richness,, and the confusion in all intellectual and cultural centres in
the United States between information, and knowledge,. Perhaps a comparison
between "A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee and the writings of
most of the famous American writers on politics and the struggle of civilizations
would clarify the point I am trying to make.
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- IX- Islamic Societies and Problems with the Meaning of
Progress, and Modernity,.
-
- A combination of closed autocratic regimes, outdated
educational systems, state-controlled media, and a rigid, often extremist,
understanding of religion renders many Muslims and Arabs wary of notions
like progress, and modernity,. The internal factors I have mentioned coupled
with a number of external factors, such as the infantile culture in some
highly developed nations, have led the Muslim Arab mind to think that the
call for progress and modernity is a call for dependence and the loss of
cultural specificity. What exacerbates the situation is that many Arabs
and Muslims feel that the values of Western civilization are for westerners
only, not for everyone. I have exerted tremendous efforts to make it clear
to my readers in Egypt and the Middle East that modernization is a human
phenomenon first and foremost. The prescription for progress has no nationality
or religion, as borne out by the different cultural backgrounds of such
developed societies as the United States, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and
South Korea. I devoted one of my books, "The Values of Progress, to
demonstrating to the young people in my society the fallacy of the argument
that progress and modernization will result in the loss of our identity
and cultural specificity. As a man who has applied modern management techniques
on a large scale, I know that there is successful management, and unsuccessful
management,, but I have no knowledge of Arab, Chinese, African, or French
management. Japan developed in leaps and bounds over the last fifty years,
but Japanese society, especially outside the capital, is still quintessentially
Japanese. Whoever denies that progress is a purely human phenomenon and
that the process leading to it is also human has obviously never seen the
mechanics of progress at first hand - which may be the reason most academics
are not interested in the issue.
-
- Oppressive regimes are matched by the local citizen who
lacks any connection with the outside world and who thinks that modernity
is the other side of the coin of dependence. He would not believe that
democracy is a human product, and a human right and not a Western commodity
for westerners, nor realize that the maxim that "for each society,
there is the brand of democracy that suits it is misleading. For while
it is true that there are many forms of democracy, it is equally true that
they all contain mechanisms of accountability designed to bring rulers
down from the realm of masters to that of servants of society.
-
- The question over the future of the Muslim mind is the
same as the question over the future of Islamic societies: is it a future
of freedom, democracy, prosperity and progress, or the opposite? The answer
to this question will determine the answer to the question about the future
of the Muslim mind: will it follow the route of moderate Islam or that
of Wahabbi Islam?
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