The years of wandering and peril: until when? / Dr. Fadi Elhusseini

The opinions contained in the article express only the opinion of their author and do not necessarily express the opinion of Pal-Think for Strategic Studies

By Dr Fadi al-Husseini

I was and still am among the believers in what they named the Arab Spring: an uprising of peoples, a revolution of a nation, and a sweeping desire to change a loathsome status quo. But no sooner had the years passed than most people became hateful, pessimistic, hesitant — indeed averse to acknowledging that the peoples' desires may be subjected to a setback or retreat or even feebleness and wandering. In the eyes of the hesitant, the sincerity of the protesters' desires and the boldness of the risers was not taken into account; indeed they deemed it too much that the Arab citizen should one day have a decision to shake off the dust of humiliation and change the demeaning status quo. So the easiest and most widespread argument was that it was a theory of an external conspiracy woven with cunning, from the moment of its beginning — that is, when Bouazizi burned himself in Tunisia — to this day of ours, without any errors worth mentioning, until we reached the ethnic and sectarian tendencies and the talk of a new Sykes–Picot and the dividing of the already divided, in an Arab world that has become more than at any time past fragmented, weak, and sad.

Yes, external intervention has become a fact, not an analysis; and the longer the revolutions' span stretched, the sharper the intervention grew, and accordingly the harsh consequences upon the countries' inhabitants. In Tunisia, the revolution there gave the external powers no chance to deal quickly with events, because it came as a shock and without planning, as some believed. In Egypt, events were quick as well, and the external intervention was limited and at its beginning, but matters were decided quickly, so there was no room for the external powers to intervene to deflect the compass of events in a direction serving their interest. As for the rest of the Arab Spring states, the slowness of the revolutions' development was reason enough to give all the powers the chance to intervene and pounce on the revolutions of peoples desiring change. So the tragedies began to creep from house to house, and from country to country, until our condition reached the point that people began to thank God for the blessing of the single ruler, the commander and forbidder, the dictator — even if he repressed and humiliated them and deprived them of their rights and freedoms; for one affliction is lighter than another, and poverty, humiliation, and subjugation are easier than killing, displacement, and refuge.

But how did we fail in our revolutions while others succeeded? And how could they build from their aches homelands, and from their pains cultures and refinement, while we demolished with our own hands our glories, and turned our pride and the strength of our unity into fragmentation and dispersal?

The easiest path is accusing the distant other of conspiring against us to make the dearest of our dear abject, accepting disgrace, seeking a life in any form even if it be like the life of slaves — that is, transforming us from Arabs into anything but Arabs, so that there came to be among us those ashamed to say they are Arab; so it roused origins extinct for thousands of years, and revived tribal calls buried since a distant time. There may be in this accusation something of truth, for conspiring against the other is not a novel matter in human history; but history tells us also that there is no citadel or impregnable wall that an invader could cross without help from within, or feebleness in one of the sides of this fortified wall.

Our weakness came from within our walls: our fortresses are no longer fortresses strong enough to repel any external invasion, because our internal fronts are disjointed and exhausted, so feebleness crept into them and wandering became the title of our tales. And lest the matter be confused for the reader and their thought drift to the old time: the invasion today is not by soldiers and garrisons, but a cultural, intellectual invasion at all levels. Yes, our internal front is weak to a degree no mind can believe — indeed the pace of this weakness and feebleness has accelerated in a manner that cannot be imagined.

Since the fifties of the last century, no sooner had presidents who drew strength from abroad — whether east or west — mastered rule in the Arab lands than they saw in the education and cultivation of their peoples the greatest danger to their survival, an alarm bell driving a nail into the coffin of their rule: for if the citizen knows where their rights begin and when their ruler's duties end, the ruled becomes the actual ruler. So the levels of education began to retreat, and books and writers became either directed to serve the ruler or banned, to seek the freedom of writing outside the borders of their homelands. Hence it was no wonder to see — even to this day of ours — that in our Arab lands there is compulsory conscription and optional education, which is the complete opposite in the lands of the West, where you see compulsory education, indeed supported by the governments, while the choice is left to the citizen to join conscription or not.

And speaking of the levels of education in our Arab lands: first of all we must not be drawn into empty slogans like the gratuity of education — especially as the government schools do not present the minimum of learning that accords with the developments of this age, amid the decline of teachers' levels, the crowding of classrooms with students, and the limitedness of the scholarly levels presented in these schools. In return, the private schools appeared, most of them foreign — American, French, Canadian, German, and others — but they are a monopoly of the sons of a particular class; the ordinary citizen cannot manage to enrol his children in them for the exaggerated rise in tuition fees. The astonishing matter is that although these foreign schools present something like what they present in their own lands, such as encouraging reading, the arts, and sport, most Arab students take from them nothing but the superficiality of Western culture, in form — because as soon as they return to their homes they go back to the culture that sees in these schools nothing but a social appearance by which the notables of the people distinguish themselves.

We may not have the right to generalise, but by reading some preliminary data we cannot pass over this conclusion: we have not heard, since these schools appeared in the Arab lands more than fifteen years ago, of an Arab scientist or thinker or space researcher or novelist who graduated from these schools — because quite simply, if one of the students excels, their destination is at once the lands of the West, by desire, enticement, or pressure. As for those who remain, they keep for themselves the superficiality of the West's culture. Hence we should not be astonished when we see that at the time the West has begun to produce conservative nationalist governments and parties, the Arabs move away from their nationhood, seeking an openness and modernity resembling the West in its form. As for those who remained in the public and government schools, the dilapidation of educational levels, in parallel with the poverty of the culture of reading and enlightenment, greatly eased the creeping of destructive, extremist, and deviant ideas into our lands — and the results are plain.

With the continuation of the Arabs' revolutions, the sharpness of the fall increased. The World Government Summit in Dubai in the middle of February of this year showed terrifying figures and indicators warning of what is worse: of a total of 410 million Arab citizens there are 57 million who do not know reading and writing, and 13.5 million Arab children did not join school this year. The Arab world combined produces only 20 thousand books annually — that is, less than a state like Romania; likewise the Arabs combined managed to present only 2,900 patents, while a state like South Korea presented 20,201 patents.

And because the collapse of education means the collapse of the nation, the results came plain, no doubt about them: although the Arab world represents only 5% of the world's population, it suffers 45% of the terrorist attacks worldwide; this year 75% of the world's refugees came to be Arabs, and 68% of the deaths of wars worldwide Arabs; more than 14 million Arabs were displaced between the years 2011 and 2017, and in the same period the human losses reached 1.4 million Arab dead and wounded, and infrastructure worth 460 billion dollars was destroyed. As for the cost of corruption in the Arab region, it reached a trillion dollars, with five Arab states on the list of the ten most corrupt states in the world.

In the conclusion of this article of ours we say that the ruin of a people does not come by the act of the outside — because destroying nations needs no armies or warships; it requires only the killing of education and the smothering of thought, learning, and cultivation. Then the patient dies at the hands of a failed doctor, people recoil from religion because of an ignorant sheikh, and right is lost with the presence of an unjust judge — and then be certain that at the head of this country is a leader unconcerned with the future of his nation.