Arab denial of Western superiority has backfired in the Middle East
A man walks in front of the Mall of Arabia in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (Arbitrarily, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Most Arabs and Muslims will not grant that the
West’s civilization is superior. They will admit that it is more
technologically or materially advanced, but they deny that the West has
achieved any cultural or ethical advance or superiority. There is a
half-deliberate, half-incidental disregard for the West’s political and
legal achievements, which are sometimes dismissed by referring to the
contradictions that seem to undermine their foundation. This is
abundantly clear when we hear acknowledgements of the West’s tremendous
industrial capabilities alongside descriptions of its cultural decadence
and lack of moral discipline.
Most currents and schools of thought in the Arab
world agree on this point, even if they differ in their explanations,
descriptions and details. None of them have ever asked themselves: Could
a decadent and morally undisciplined culture have provided the basis
for tremendous industrial capabilities?
Maybe for this reason time will show that the
Arab-Islamic attitude toward the West is mistaken in its outlook,
justifications and conclusions. This attitude reveals that the
Arab-Islamic perspective (with the possible exceptions of Malaysia and
Indonesia) continues to be in thrall to a past that could only ever be
resurrected through destructive means. But its error is even more
dangerous than that, because it expresses a civilizational impotence and
exhaustion more than it expresses any coherent political stance,
civilizational vision or alternative civilizational project. The
greatest evidence of the incoherence and injustice of this vision is
that you find Baathists, Nasserists, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians,
Salafis, Muslim Brotherhood, nationalists and leftists all joining
together to mock the West, deride its ethical incoherence and despise or
disregard its political achievements. This comes at a high cost,
because it does not reflect a real consensus as much as it represents an
empty opportunism void of political substance and the least amount of
moral probity.
This attitude brings together such disparate
figures as Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the leader of the
so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, al-Nusra Front leader Abu
Muhammed al-Julani, head of the Change and Reform bloc Michel Aoun and
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (who is incidentally also the
Secretary-General of the Arab Socialist Baath Party—Syria Region).
Ranged alongside them are other figures who have since left this world,
such as Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, Abdel Nasser, Abd al-Karim
Qasim, Abdul Salam Arif and many more. They are also joined by Salafi
and Muslim Brotherhood sheikhs and sheikhs from various other schools of
thought. Lately Houthi leader Abdel Malik al-Houthi has joined the list
as well. What is striking—and significant—is that whereas they concur
in this coarse opportunism, they disagree on everything else. They are
engaged in brutal, bloody clashes on the battlefields of religious wars
in Iraq and Syria, fighting on the basis of a sectarianism that they
have no shame in avowing.
Consider with me this landscape that has now
prevailed for more than a century: political leaders, religious clerics,
intellectuals, journalists, religious thinkers, artists and different
schools of thought relentlessly mock the West and downplay its
civilizational superiority without offering an alternative. Instead,
their own views always lead to infighting and wars between them, or to
justifications for endless wars and battles. What is strange is this
seeming consensus to disparage the West and its civilizational
achievement has never bolstered what they call the “united
[Arab-Islamic] front,” but rather has always led to fissures and
disintegration. Ironically, it always increases the pretexts for war and
strife between these factions, which still never tire of their superior
attitude. The more they mock the West, the more their disputes and
divisions escalate. How strange is it that the more they mock, the more
the mockers have cause to fight one another. What does this mean?
Before you answer, consider these three points:
First, in most countries, the Arab Spring (which
cannot be said to have ended) has turned into a gelid and deadly Arab
Autumn or even Winter. This outcome has seemed to many an occasion to
revisit conspiratorial thinking about plots to divide the region—as if
the Middle East were a dish of chocolate or fruit just waiting to be
divvied up from the outside. Was Muammar Gaddafi part of the conspiracy
to divide Libya? Is Bashar al-Assad a part of the current conspiracy to
divide Syria? Are Ali Abdullah Saleh and Abdullah al-Houthi part of a
conspiracy to divide Yemen? You will not find an answer to this among
conspiracy theorists. Not because there is not an answer, but because
like those who mock, they are preoccupied with pinning the conspiracy on
the West. The conspiracy is comforting and it relieves them from the
difficulties of analysis, painful self-reflection and accepting
responsibility.
The second point is that the people most
committed to and loudest in their mockery, disparagement and resistance
to the West are the most politically backwards, the most sectarian, and
the most brutal against Arabs and Muslims—and, in particular, toward the
people that they themselves belong to and govern. Leave ISIS aside for
the moment, since that is a self-evident example. There is an example
older than ISIS that is similar to it and which paved the way for its
emergence, an example that combined these qualities of mockery of the
West, sectarianism and brutality: the Syrian regime itself. Since 1963,
the feature that has most distinguished the Syrian regime has been
combining brutality with mockery of the West, while claiming to resist
the West. It is no surprise then that Syria’s current president led
Syria to the most vicious civil war in its history. After the death of
300,000 people, and the displacement of more than half of the Syrian
population, Bashar al-Assad has the gall to claim that he is fighting
terrorism. In the same context, you find Hezbollah—which is the loudest
proponent of “resistance”—to be the most drenched in the blood of Arabs
and Muslims in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, while it is trying to do the
same in Bahrain and Yemen as well. Who is trying to divide Syria in this
case? Russia? The Americans? The EU? Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey? Or
is it Iran and its Shiite militias? Or the leadership of the Syrian
regime itself and its foreign and domestic allies?
The third point is that the vast majority of Arab
migrants who are fleeing Arab civil wars do not go to other Arab
countries or to Iran. Could you imagine Syrian refugees going to Iran,
especially when most of them are Sunni, not Shiite? In the same way,
could you imagine Shiite refugees from Iraq or Alawites from Syria going
to Jordan or Saudi Arabia? When some refugees went to Jordan and
Lebanon, it was a textbook example of a hostile reception, bad housing
and lack of services, alongside a loss of dignity and rights. This is
despite the fact that the Arabs talk most of “dignity,” rather than
rights, and despite the fact that the “Party of Resistance”—whose
supporters found a generous welcome in Syria in 2006—dominates Lebanon.
Do you see the irony (according to the logic of Arab-Islamic mockery of
the West) in the fact that Syrian refugees in Turkey, Europe and the US
are much better off?
These points clearly show that mockery of the
West and disparagement of its superiority are a flight from reality and a
shameful self-justification and excuse for an inability to succeed. It
is an excuse for bigotry, religious obscurantism and sectarianism, and,
first and foremost, for authoritarianism. Over time, this mockery and
disparagement has turned into a political and ideological mechanism for
reproducing an outworn and obsolete culture that props up
authoritarianism and incubates authoritarianism’s fellow henchman:
sectarianism. What is unclear is how this mockery of the West and
disparagement of its superiority turned into a civilizational complex
that over time has become an insurmountable obstacle for the Arab
themselves.
This piece originally appeared in Al-Hayat, and in English translation in The Arabist. Translation by Industry Arabic.
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