I have never been a great fan of the collective “Arabs.” It assumes a level of homogeneity I as an “Arab” have not felt. Yet there are broad brushed tendencies that can safely be assumed when looking at our people. Our polarized worldview is one such proclivity which renders us immune to noting gradations and more inclined to be extremist in our views. A phenomenon, event or person must be entirely good or bad.

Words like always, never, all, terrible, excellent, good, bad, are staples of our everyday language when life mostly falls in that middle ground where outlooks, moral and otherwise, reflect the limitations of personal perspectives, at least in my opinion. A corollary of all of this is a culture of dissent characterized by the same tendency which ebbs and flows depending on the political environment. In the face of turmoil, stances are usually hardened, sentiments are heightened and the bounds of acceptable political discourse are automatically narrowed.

To mine the complexity and depth of this phenomenon in a short opinion piece is no easy task considering the intricate web of factors that go into play to foster this pathology whether in our history, our interpretation of religion, and our culture, among others. I will however select three factors I believe feed this inclination to extremism.

First, there is the classical Arab style of public administration characterized by a monopoly of resources and control of legislative, judicial and executive organs and civil society alike. To build legitimacy, the uni-vocal advocating regimes tame their subjects to a dualistic worldview that imbues the mind with a positive self-stereotype and a corresponding derogatory one of others. This cognitive geocentricism is not peculiar to Arabs. It is factored in the manufacturing of any nation. But it has become especially acute amongst alienated intra-state factions within Arab countries that have adopted it from their masters who in turn have failed to create secular national identities transcending the myriad of ethnic, religious and sectarian affiliations we see around.

These various sub-national groups have recently however been gravitating towards a single narrative where the US and Israel are pitted against the rest of the Arab world. Some might argue that this is nothing new but it is. The convergence of these groups along this one axis pulling along many centrists to their ranks is alarming especially to weaker stakeholders such as the traditionally feeble moderate liberal camp.

The strength of this camp has been dwindling fast as individuals and groups are either lost to the first extremist camp or increasingly find nothing to hold on to, to justify their seemingly treacherous stands in light of recent US policies in the region. With fragile gains in the reform arena, and a discourse couched in conciliatory rather than the more popular absolutist terms, this dying creed is being discredited, and its members cast as traitors, collaborators and agents.
The surfacing narrative is gaining ground even amongst the educated classes as it meshes well with a background of conspiratorial thinking we have traditionally been accustomed to.

On the other side of the spectrum one finds the almost comical side of all of this. An interesting book has just been published in Cairo confirming that Saddam was not executed, and that his execution watched by millions around the globe was part of an American hoax! Yes the book has been published unfortunately. And this brings us to the second factor which is education.

The negative effects of rote learning and the benefits of teaching critical thinking skills are well documented. Education affects the way one processes information. One of the findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of conceptual structures or frames actually present in the synapses of our brains. When new facts don’t fit these existing frames, the frames, present in the form of neural circuitry, are kept intact and the new information is discarded. Some refer to this phenomenon as “cognitive dissonance,” a very acute form of which the Arab street suffers from. No where is this more apparent today than amongst Saddam’s sympathizers. In a recent conversation with an Iraqi Sunni residing in the UAE, my assertions about documented atrocities that Saddam committed against Iraqi citizens were dismissed as she insisted that these acts, if they really did happen, were all perpetrated by Iran. That’s as far as our efforts at historical revisionism go unless we take into account President Ahmadinejad’s negation of the Holocaust!

The third factor has been the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or more accurately referred to as the Middle East conflict. Everything at this side of the world carries a political tinge and every political tinge relates back to the Palestinian question. The single policy issue that drove opinion in the Arab world, uncontested for years has been this conflict. Kept alive for decades by various parties and for many reasons, the conflict was molded across the years into a zero-sum conflict, polarizing sides into an either with or against camps.

I like to believe that all Arabs are somewhat cognizant of how this conflict was and continues to be partly utilized to deflect the focus from other deeper national issues within our various societies. The media has been a main culprit in this effort with its focus on regional news to the detriment of more pressing and certainly more relevant issues for the national audiences with the result that a Sudanese knows more about what’s going on in the West Bank than what is going on in his own backyard (and believe me, there is a lot going on there!). Arab media’s woes are well known, but its role in fostering this extremist narrative is less so. With the flow of information interrupted and transparency compromised the entire reform project is jeopardized. Starved of critical information, a tool important to generate strategies and benchmarks and to empower the public to partake in the debate, societies remain unengaged and governments unresponsive.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have had to operate under the same restrictions and have often opted to adopt the same level of self-censorship, engaging “safe” issues that don’t ruffle feathers. In 2004, The National Organization for Human Rights (NOHR), Saudi Arabia’s first non-government human rights organization was created. In his column in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Tariq Al-Hameed commented on the Secretary-General’s statement that the issue of Guantanamo Bay detainees will top the new Organization’s priorities. I wondered back then, as the writer did, how an organization set up to focus on human rights would intentionally ignore the flagrant domestic problems of interest to the Saudi citizen to focus on an issue that should be taken up by the government.

These factors are certainly not meant to exhaust this discussion but to shed light on one side of the story; a side we can have control over. In such an environment, the need for reform must be everyone’s new conviction until we learn to accept variety and permit criticism, and more importantly establish those stable institutions through which opposition can be channeled. And while reform is a process that will take time, this is a challenge that can be taken up today to try to marshal every effort to dislodge these practices and broaden the bounds of debate beyond the liberal echelon of Arab society.

What makes this necessity all the more imperative is the current alarming condition in this region, corners of which are swirling in the orbit of violence, while other parts await their turn.

Tags: dima toukan, media, philosophy, rhetoric