Intellectuals and the Arab Cultural Revolution

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Arab unrest that began in Tunisia proved that Arab backwardness has driven its stakes forcefully into every Arab joint, and that this backwardness stretches from the ordinary man in the street to senior intellectuals, media figures, and men of politics, science, and knowledge.

Instead of the Arab unrest becoming an opportunity for construction, progress, development, and civilizational revival, it turned, in many cases, into a tragedy generating sorrow and deep wounds within the Arab psyche, and instead of intellectuals and thinkers rising to steer this unrest toward the good and the honor of the nation, many of them withdrew far from the scene, some of them continuing to raise the banner of despotism, defending the despots, and some of them seeing in backwardness a virtue, entrenching themselves defending and reinforcing it.

The media, too, split between defenders of despotism, injustice, and humiliation, and those who embraced fanaticism, killing, bloodshed, destruction, and sabotage. It appears the terrorism practiced by the various warring voices has silenced many from speaking the truth or putting forward opinions with strength, boldness, and courage.

The balanced Arab mind has largely gone missing amid the flood of flowing blood and demolished homes, and the arena remains open before the ignorant, the fanatics, and those among the wealthy and the media who back them, and before the despots who monopolize the tools of repression and torment. Everyone has done harm — either to Islam and its image before the world, or to the Arab, who has come to appear as a defender of the very forces erasing and enslaving him.

On the Margins of the Unrest

According to the movement of history, intellectuals are expected to stand at the forefront of Arab unrest, at least in terms of the ideas and the economic, political, and moral programs that ought to be adopted for the Arabs’ revival.

The French Revolution, for instance, drew its ideals, ethics, and aspirations from what France’s philosophers wrote and defended, and the same was true for Britain, Germany, and a number of other European states.

In the countries of the East, Algeria was influenced by the arguments of its thinkers and intellectuals on methods of confronting French colonialism, and the Iranian revolution had intellectual theorists spreading awareness in people’s minds to unify their aspirations. We cannot deny the role Arab intellectuals played in spreading some awareness among Arab citizens, but this never crystallized, over time, into a clear intellectual direction uniting the Arab street, and the Arab arena remained full of intellectual and logical contradictions that contributed to the absence of a single compass, and Arab intellectuals remained under the hammer of the Arab regimes, largely abstaining from pushing toward the cultural unity of the nation’s masses, and some of them decided to flee their own countries to work in the Western states, at ease, no longer pursued by Arab security services.

Arab intellectuals trailed behind the Arab unrest instead of standing at its head, directing people. Even the Arab parties were not the ones who sparked the unrest — they were forced to fall under the leadership of the public, which looks toward an ambiguous future that might deliver it from poverty, oppression, and despotism.

The Arab arena has not witnessed a unifying, consciousness-raising process carried by intellectuals to lead the nation toward salvation. Of course, the reasons behind this failure are many, and difficult to address fully in this article — and beyond that, there are Arab intellectuals, thinkers, and opinion leaders who have decisively chosen the un-cultured and the immoral, remaining tools for this party or that.

For instance, Arab intellectuals in Egypt, Mauritania, Palestine, and Sudan stood against the results of free elections and what those results produced. Some of them still stand with rigidity, fanaticism, and bloodshed, defending crimes, and some of them support repressive, criminal Arab regimes that have trampled on the people’s dignity, plundered its wealth, and turned it into a mount for Western colonialism.

Worse still, there are Arab intellectuals who support Israel, praising its performance and inciting it against Arab resistance. There are intellectuals who normalize with Israel, recognize it, and lend it their support, and other intellectuals who work in the service of the United States and other colonial states, to enable their control over the nation’s fate, its wealth, and the determination of its destiny and future.

Some Arab intellectuals contribute to spreading a particular parochial culture, entrenching the reality of Arab fragmentation and entrenching cultural plurality across the Arab arena, in line with colonial wishes and with the policies of the Arab regimes that have done harm to everything beautiful on the Arab scene.

Many intellectuals work to twist the arm of truth for private interests and to please those with influence and money, selling their minds at the cheapest prices to become tools of demolition and backwardness.

Some intellectuals have decided to enter the filthiest Arab circle of all: the security services. There are intellectuals working in the Arab security services, carrying out acts of pursuit and torture against opponents, holders of opinion, or free speech.

On the religious side, there are intellectuals who fear God not at all, ready to issue whimsical fatwas serving their own views and those of their masters who supply them with money. These sell their afterlife for this world under religious slogans — they encourage crime, issue fatwas in its favor, and shed blood, and have turned the Islamic religion, in the eyes of the peoples of the earth, into a religion of crime, killing, fornication, and violation of honor, going so far in their transgression that Islam has turned, in the souls of many Muslims, into a frightening bogeyman to be disavowed.

Cultural Unity Is a Necessity

It is important for intellectuals to play their historic role in spreading awareness among the nation’s masses, so that they finally unite around a future vision that leads them out of darkness into light, from enslavement into liberation, from the yoke of the people of the West into independence, freedom, and dignity.

For Arab intellectuals to be able to play the historic role required of them, they must first unite, or gather together to deliberate, research, and study, so that they, or some of them, might develop cultural programs on scientific rather than ideological foundations, uniting the nation and forming a compass for its future action, so that Arab unrest in the future is conscious and clear in its goals, rather than ambiguous and stumbling in its future vision.

Arab intellectuals, thinkers, and academics need to gather to discuss a cultural program suited to building a nation grounded in scientific thinking and logical analysis, and afterward work to achieve it. The issues put forward for discussion, to unify opinion around them, are many — I note among them: the freedom of the Arab individual and the path toward securing it, and the question of Arab unity, which the Arabs cannot avoid addressing, taking a popular decision regarding it, particularly since the Arab regimes have worked hard to keep the nation torn apart, and to tear apart every single Arab country through stirring sectarian, denominational, and ethnic strife.

Also the question of plundered Arab wealth, whether by the ruling regimes or the Western states; the question of the threatened Nile waters, which will have a negative effect on both Egypt and Sudan; and the question of Palestine, which has remained stuck for decades.

This vast nation, sprawling in geography and population, has remained powerless before a tiny statelet possessing no means of survival other than Arab weakness. It is the responsibility of Arab intellectuals to work toward cultural rapprochement among the peoples of the Arab nation in their daily lives, customs, and traditions.

It is important, for Arab cultural unity, that the Arab not feel like a stranger when moving from one Arab country to another, and, above all, it is important to develop an Arab value-system that establishes matters fundamental to any nation, such as belonging, commitment, loyalty, responsibility, accountability, the rejection of fanaticism, care for the common good and the public interest, building credibility and mutual trust, and valuing freedom and creativity.

Our value-system is broken, and the Arab regimes remain at the top of the pyramid of those breaking it, given their mastery of deception, lying, evasion, oppressing people, embezzling funds, disregarding capabilities, and relying on favoritism and nepotism to corrupt people’s morals. If Arab intellectuals succeed in this, they will have recorded a great victory over the Arab regimes, which constantly work to entrench local concerns that help manufacture local cultures. Then we would no longer need to use weapons, because a nation that stands on sound guidance automatically expels its own corrupt rulers.

It is necessary to focus on the basic Arab concerns troubling everyone, to make them tools for building a unified Arab concern. Right now, Lebanon has its concerns, Syria has its concerns, and every Arab country has concerns that preoccupy it from the concerns of the nation as a whole. We have observed how Israel unleashed killing and destruction in Gaza, and the feeling of a son of South Africa toward Palestinians was warmer than the feeling of a son of this or that Arab country. Focusing on shared concerns weakens the focus on private concerns, and ultimately pushes toward the search for shared solutions rather than parochial ones.

The Curse of Arab Intelligence Services

The Arab intelligence services will, without doubt, work to strike down every attempt at gathering across the Arab arena, and will work to pursue intellectuals and take measures against them. This is a great obstacle, constituting traditional Arab terrorism against the sons of the nation, but it is possible to make use of modern communication technology for exchanging opinions, ideas, and draft programs.

It is necessary for the attack on the Arab security services to be part of the cultural construction effort, in order to reduce their power and influence in tearing apart and weakening the nation. Perhaps promoting the idea of security services that defend the nation instead of defending the political regime would be useful. It is important that the abolition of the Arab security services in their current form become one of the most important elements of defending the freedom of the Arab individual.

The Media

Arab intellectuals cannot drive an Arab cultural revolution without the cooperation of Arab media, since the media plays a fundamental, pivotal role across various global arenas, capable of conveying information to people, expanding their horizons, and raising their levels of awareness. Whoever is incapable of conveying his ideas, concerns, and interests to people is incapable, media-wise.

For this reason, Arab intellectuals need to focus their efforts on the media, hoping it cooperates, and hoping some of it adopts the idea and pushes toward it — not to mention that many Arab media figures belong to the class of intellectuals, and many of them are committed to the causes of the Arab nation and encourage confronting its challenges.

But we must take into account that the Arab media figure is repressed and pursued, the security services monitoring him and taking measures against him, and a media figure is required to be aware of the red lines the intelligence services set, so that he becomes his own intelligence agent.

For this reason, the Arab media figure works in an atmosphere of extreme caution and wariness, so as not to fall into what is forbidden and find himself out on the street without work, or in the basements of interrogation and torture. The security services have struck terror into the hearts of media figures, save for a rare few.

Repression is not confined to the security services — it sometimes extends to the media outlet’s owner, its editor-in-chief, and its managing editor, because they do not want the red lines crossed, and they usually vent their anger on employees who search for the truth and work to publish it, because of the loss in advertising or the summons for interrogation that could result. What is required, then, is that lying and distortion remain the masters of media activity.

Truth, in our countries, is the enemy of many people, who are always ready to destroy whoever declares it to the public. Right is a poor, wretched thing in our Arab countries, its supporters few, and were it not for it, our prisons would not remain so full of inmates.

There are many, varied Arab channels with different orientations — some devoted to praising and lauding the ruling regime, some occupied with tales of jinn and demons, dream interpretation, and bizarre fatwas, and some that exist, at root, for corruption and corrupting others.

What matters is the necessity of focusing on the media, hoping it contributes to bringing about fundamental change on the Arab scene without killing and bloodshed. The trust resting on intellectuals’ shoulders is heavy, but carrying it is worth the sacrifice and hardship.

Arab intellectuals are no less capable than the intellectuals of the world, nor than the intellectuals of the French Revolution and the revolutions of the European states generally, and of Latin America and Asia, and they are capable of carrying the concerns of the nation and advancing with them toward human and civilizational progress.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “المثقفون والثورة الثقافية العربية” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.