The brilliant Lebanse liberal Hazem Saghiye writes in today's al-Hayat that the weak Arab response - both in feeling and in financial terms - to the tsunami has raised painful questions about the Arab world for Arabs and non-Arabs. He points out the irony of Arabs demanding that the world pay attention to their issues, while remaining completely uninterested in the issues of others. He attributes this to the unfortunate rise of a politics of identity and authenticity in Arab political culture. He dismisses stupid attempts to politicize or religion-ize the natural disaster, dismisses conspiracy theories about American-Israeli nuclear experiments. The weak Arab response to the tsunami, he muses, reflects a damning parochialism, which has left Arabs isolated from the broader trends in the world. Along the lines I've been noting the last few days, Saghiye writes that it is time to link up this problem with the more general challenge of reform.
Mustafa al-Fiqi also has an essay on the tsunami in al-Hayat, which tries to draw lessons for the world from the tragedy. Most of his lessons are global in scope, but towards the end of the essay he writes that emerging signs of greater Arab concern for the victims of the tsunami, suggesting more integratration into the problems of global society and the crises of other peoples, is a hopeful sign for a change in the Arab mentality. Arabs must stop distinguishing between our problems and those of others, and instead think in terms of a shared humanity, he writes. In response to those who ask why all this concern for the tsunami, but not for victims in Baghdad or Palestine or Darfur - which is also a common recurring theme popping up in Arab discourse - he turns the question around and asks why we Arabs should expect others to care about us if we don't care about them. Is their blood cheaper than ours, he asks? To them, the answer must be no, and what follows is that Arabs must recognize their place in the wider world and defend a common humanity rather than only fight for their "own" issues.
Okay, I'm going to weigh in with what may be a moderately unpopular view.
Talk of "reform" in the Arab media is a popular buzz phrase with a properly "authentic" Islamic lineage (cf. the overwhelming number of parties, groups, and publications that adopt the rallying cry of "Islah"). Some of these groups - and I can speak particularly about the Islah party in Yemen - have begun to concretize their calls for reform and push for change through formal and informal political institutions, though I would argue that such action is more the exception than the rule.
What Saghiye's calling for requires a paradigmatic shift in discourse that would rest on an even more substantial change in worldview. While I would argue that changes in discourse can be effected by elites, fundamental changes in mentality on the order that these two are (justifiably) calling for need to emenate from below. All of this brings me full circle back to institutions, namely educational and popular religious institutions.
So, here's the rub: Islamists both lobby for and receive influence in the education ministries of several regional governments. While I am making no statement whatsoever about whether Islam (however defined) should be included in state curricula, what is important to note is that the vision of some Islamists (especially regarding the binaries, for example, of Dar as-Salaam and Dar al-Harb, or Hizb Allah and Hizb al-Shaytan) may be helping to produce the very form of identity politics cited by Saghiye, and that institutional reforms can just as likely produce outcomes that are antithetical to Saghiye's aims, depending on the reformer.
I wholeheartedly agree that none of us should expect to be of concern to those whose plight we ignore, which is why a number of admirable Islamist activists are seeing tsunami relief efforts as an opportunity for daw'a-through-deeds. But for now, calls for "thought reform" such as Saghiye's are implausible without a more systematic look at the institutions that produce thought (that sounded more Orwellian than I intended).
Posted by: Stacey | January 12, 2005 at 10:08 AM
I actually realized that my students (at an elite university in the Middle East) had no knowledge of the world outside the Middle East when they failed to identify China and India on an unmarked map. That day I cancelled class and cried.
Posted by: Vikash Yadav | January 12, 2005 at 02:01 PM