For How Long Can the Arabs Continue To Blame "The Others" For THEIR Retardation?

Time for the Arabs to get up from their easy chairs, look in the mirror and say: "We too are to blame!!"  Self-criticism is a virtue, a sign of maturity, and the point at which the Arab World would begin to own its future.

Yes, we know!!  The Sykes-Picot secret agreement between Britain and France during World War I was a huge betrayal to Arab nationhood and independence.  Colonization of Syria and Lebanon by France; Iraq and Palestine and Jordan by Great Britain; Balfour Declaration for the creation of a national home for the Jews in a part of Palestine; and a free hand in the Gulf for the Union Jack.

Prior to these national calamities, visited upon the Arab homeland nearly a hundred years ago, was the continuation of British occupation of Egypt and the Sudan; Italian hegemony over Libya, and French protectorates over most of the Maghreb, west of Tripoli.

During those dark ages, the Arabs were humiliated; their national leaders were exiled, killed, or imprisoned; their language, the language of the Quran, was given secondary importance in the curriculum. Arab culture was denigrated; national uprisings were put down ferociously as if they were crimes against humanity.  From ages of glory, to ages of western imperialism and in your face ascendancy!!

But that was more than a hundred years ago.  Yes the Wilsonian "right to self-determination" remained mere ink on worthless paper.  But by the end of World War II, an earlier Arab Spring of national liberation changed nearly everything.  By 1962, with Algeria's independence, which I witnessed as UN spokesman, the Arabs, with the exception of the Palestinians, became masters of their own houses, or shall we say palaces.

However, who replaced the western colonialists?  Arab dictators!!  Inter-Arab Cold War!!  Swinging from alliances with either the West or the East!!  Or being non-aligned!!  Politics became the sport of an indecisive elite.  But the street and the mosque were left to religion largely defined as mere rituals not as renewal of values especially "the acceptance of the other." 

Armies marched proudly, but on parade grounds, except when enforcing the will of the dictator.  Education became largely costless but also worthless.  The press became mere gossip sheets, or poor translations of how the developed world perceived us.  Gender inequality found its support in the misunderstanding of Sharia (Islamic Law).  Oil made the Gulf rich in liquidity, but did not create truly industrial societies.  Federations were fabricated from the top, and quickly dissolved through either inter-dictator piques or through putsches.

The Baath party was born, so was the Muslim Brotherhood.  The one became secular fascism, the other became religious fascism.  Nascent democracies became a tool to paper over one-party rule.  College degrees could not qualify the holder for jobs.

The League of Arab States (LAS) was trumpeted, but remained a mere talk show.  Membership in the UN Security Council, though it continued to be "The Great Hall of Deadlocks," became a phony badge of national prestige!!

Qaddafi called Libya "The Great Popular Socialist Jamahiryah;" Saddam thought Kuwait was his to take by force, and Arafat rushed to hug him as an Arab gesture of solidarity.  How Machiavellian!!  The Sudan fragmented.  Israeli settlerism in territories allotted to an Arab State remained largely immune from condemnation as flouting international law.

With the 40's, the 50's, the 60's and the 70's gone, came over the Arab world, the dark cloud of militant Islamism.  The great content of Islam was replaced by the disturbing context of "Islam Is the Answer."  Images without substance.

Al-Qaradawi assumed in Qatar the mantles of the great Gamal El-Deen Al-Afghani, Muhammad Abdo and Rasheed Ridha.  His fatwas were sought as if emanating from a great oracle or from the great Al-Azhar in Cairo.  The Khomeini Revolution of 1979 attempted exportation.  But deservedly failed, except -except for making the veil and the long beard Islamic requirements.

That was the first wave.  The second wave (waves always overlap) was jihadism born of Al-Qaeda's rise in consequence of the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan.  And from pin-pricks to the catastrophic 9/11.  Don't laugh, but some Arabs blames it on the CIA.  And from here Islamophobia reared its head, especially in America and Europe.  A boon for jihadism which grew out of ignorance of Islam by the West.  It also grew out of the Muslims ignorance of the continuous evolution of Islamic Law in the direction of "The Maslaha Jurisprudence." (The Laws of Communal Interest).

The third wave was the Arab Spring.  A rumbling earthquake.  It began, but seemingly without and end.  Its ugliest form is the Syrian civil war.  A family of dictatorship, the Assads, which would rather pulverize Syria as a structure, and annihilate its population, than relinquish its ill-gotten throne.  Yet its most promising form is Egypt and Tunisia.  This is where the battle between secularism and Islamism has been decided by popular vote in favor of secularism and inclusiveness.

Throughout all the above, one could see that the Arabs, since the early 1960s, have chosen their twisted paths toward tomorrow.  "The Others" had virtually no hand in fashioning it.

• "The Others" did not cause developmental retardation;
• They did not bring one dictator after the other to the seat of power;
• They did not wreck the educational system;
• They did not enhance corruption in public life; for corruption is invariably locally manufactured;
• They did not dictate to the judiciary;
• They did not write the rubbish which is daily published under the name of "thoughtful analysis;"
• They did not degrade TV shows to their present level of superficial pastime;
• They did not cause the young and the restless to want to die crossing the Mediterranean in search of a future; and 
• They did not even anticipate the Arab Spring with its popular calls for Dignity, Development, and Democracy.

It was the Arabs who, by and large, have mismanaged their affairs:

• They have looked upon their oil wealth as a non-ending bonanza;
• They have lagged in the creation of their own defense industry;
• They have condemned terrorism but stopped short of creating powerful indigenous anti-jihadi structures;
• Their Sunnis have looked upon their Shiis as non-Muslims;
• Their only Shii State, Iraq, has bungled its relationship with its Sunni population to the point of the latter opting for joining Satanic ISIS as a means of revenge;
• Libya has become a State of militias; Sudan continues to fragment beyond the loss of the South; Yemen is in the grip of a combination of tribalism and Houthis revival; the great Sahara in both Libya and Algeria have become a prime source of jihadi military hardware; Qatar is closer in foreign policy to Turkey than it is to Saudi Arabia, the largest stakeholder in the Gulf Cooperation Council; Dubai has become more of a western implantation than an Arab enclave; and the Palestinians are still in search of national unity under a dysfunctional leadership which is expert in corruption; and Islamic Law is still unlearnt by the majority of Muslims.

For how long can the Arabs continue to blame "the others" for their retardation?  For as long as they do not see their reality in the mirror and decide to become "the new India": hundreds of languages and ethnicities; a democracy deemed to be the largest in the non-Western world; a tradition imbued with technology; and leaders who are proud to see their vehicles in outer space.

India even had a Muslim president, a Sikh Prime Minister, and a Catholic woman born in Italy as head of the former governing party, the Congress Party which the Wafd party in Egypt tried to emulate!!

Let the Arabs compare between India and Pakistan: sky above, and turmoil below.  This is the magic of forgetting the colonial past and espousing diversity.  When are the Arabs going to learn that: "Salvation comes from within?!"