What ails the Arabs, we have all asked ourselves at one time or another? Quite a lot.

Actually, come to think of it, just about everything. Where shall I begin? A wise choice would be with a friendly warning. Lawyers call it a ‘disclaimer notice’, or an ‘exclusion of liability’ clause. In my case, it is a necessary adjustment of readers’ expectations. It is a reminder that I neither claim to have the time or space to do justice to this subject, nor do I have a clue about what sober new-year resolutions could possibly salvage our doomed Titanic. So why did I choose such a big title? To grab your attention, I guess (you’re reading this far, aren’t you?). And to write something for this issue, of course, because you have grown accustomed to my monthly rants. However, please bear in mind that you are unlikely to find any earth-shattering analysis below.

A remarkable job has already been achieved by the more learned professionals who compiled the UNDP reports cataloguing the shortcomings of the Arabs. If this article will sound like a superficial exercise in self-flagellation, then probably this is exactly what it is. Therefore if you happened to be doing something more useful before landing on this page – such as plucking your eyebrows or picking your nose – I strongly urge you to please go ahead and continue whatever it is you were doing. I assure you that you are more likely to attain fulfillment there. Otherwise, you may humor me and read on. The choice is yours.

You’re still interested. Great. The first major objection you may have to my undertaking is the obvious question of why the hell I am assuming that we can treat the Arab world as one unit with common problems – while in fact it is a diverse group of separate countries, each with its own different resources, contrasting levels of development and peculiar political and social characteristics. Within the answer to this question lies one of the most astonishing ironies of the failure of the Pan-Arab ideology. After decades of persistent external and internal resistance against the dreamy notion that Arabs are a unique people with a common identity and history who can eventually be united under one federal Arab republic, something very strange took place. The same forces that drew up our political maps and succeeded in convincing us that our artificial straight line borders are an irreversible fact of history have recently had to undergo an unbelievable change of heart. The same colonial powers that finally succeeded in making us completely abandon the remote hope that we can be regarded as one people are today the very same parties who are reverting back to lumping us together as one. Believe it or not, the leaders who are now constantly referring to our fragmented nation-states using the singular expression ‘the Arab world’ are not Arab leaders but are the very Western leaders who have always resented this classification. I am not making this up. Listen to any recent speech or reference by these leaders to our region (even Ariel Sharon, for God’s sake, never bothers to make a distinction and always talks of us as one communal pain-in-the-ass he refers to as the “aravim”). It seems the West has finally succumbed to the undeniable fact that while the Arabs may bicker and be pathetic in their little tribal squabbles, when it comes to the crunch, we have to be looked at as one people. Now that’s an amazing feat of history. So if you hear me using the term ‘the Arab world’, trust me it is not because of any wishful thinking on my part. Apparently, we do constitute a unifiable nation which, oddly enough, is deemed to have a common destiny after all.

But I am not jubilating yet, for it is this destiny which scares me. In this small space, I will pick as our most destructive deficiency our stubborn refusal to acknowledge the true diagnosis of our illness as being an internal one, rather than a result of a conspiratorial assault on us by foreign powers. I’ve said this before, but it just keeps getting more relevant each time I think of it, so I must say it again and again.

It is time that we as Arabs finally underwent a serious phase of self-examination and asked ourselves why our foes have been so much better than us in advancing their causes and achieving their goals while we consistently managed to remain mired in confusion and appalling incompetence. We need to understand why we have so miserably lost and they have so triumphantly conquered. We need to honestly ask how and why we got ourselves into this bottomless pit in the first place. Indeed, one of the greatest impediments to the advancement of Arab societies has always been our collective inability to identify and separate the three distinct elements of our division and backwardness as a nation: the cause, the problem, and the solution. We have continuously confused the three. In other words, if the Arabs are today the sick man of the world, as the Ottoman Empire once had been to Europe, then we do not seem to be able to distinguish between the sources of the virus causing our ailment, the diagnosis of the disease itself and its symptoms, and the treatment and cure, if there is any. What we have been unbeatably excelling at, however, is in name-calling the disease with all sorts of eloquent insults and diatribe.

A prime example of our flawed perceptions of our predicament is the way in which we have failed to challenge the fundamental fallacy implanted in our collective consciousness that Israel is the source of all our troubles – ignoring the fact that Israel is only a symptom of our chronic impotence, a mere manifestation of our weakness. Indeed, it is our emotional and jingoistic acceptance of this enormous lie that has enabled military dictatorships to hijack entire countries, violate their people and plunder their resources for decades in the name of the higher external battle. We all duly discovered, to our inconsolable expense of course, that there had been no battle whatsoever, only an old-fashioned mafia style perpetuation of power and wealth, advanced on a platform of empty slogans. Yet we still find among us those who have not yet fathomed the equation that we are our own worst enemies; those who continue to look for the blame exclusively at the doorsteps of Israel and America – because they lack the courage to look straight in the mirror. These Arabs have not yet realized that there is not much point after more than 90 years to continue to nag and complain that foreign nations are giving us a hard time – if that is all we do. We need to snap out of it. Yes, Israel is a brutal occupying military bully and America is its faithful ally. Despicable situation, isn’t it? Granted, we have been regurgitating this fact for eternity.

But have we yet grasped what kind of hard laboring by Zionists in Israel and in the West was accomplished during a whole century to achieve this state of affairs? Have we asked ourselves what we have been contributing all along, apart from the speeches and rhetoric, to counter this imbalance? For example, the anti-American agitators amongst us never cease complaining about the undue influence of the Israeli lobby in the US, but they rarely ever pose to reflect on why the Arabs, with their mammoth wealth and resources, were unable and unwilling to play the same game of politics and develop a similar, if not necessarily comparable, political presence in the US. They still do not comprehend the harsh rules of the game at which they were severely beaten, so they continue to shout foul from the spectators’ seats. They will tell you that we must fight the West because it will never allow us to rise out of our defeat. But why should we expect any adversary nation to want us to do that? Since when do superpowers wish success for their subordinates anyway? Imagine what would have become of Germany or Japan if after the Second World War they adopted these Don Quixotian anti-American attitudes and kept crying over the humiliating conditions of their surrender – instead of silently working to rebuild their nations by decades of selfless sweat and sacrifice.
But our Arab agitators do not seem to appreciate what it takes for a nation to rise again, so they opt for the easy way out by continuously blaming the opponent for being just that: the enemy – without offering any realistic vision for resisting and overturning this inferiority. This has been our sorry state of affairs for too long; akin to a lazy mountaineer standing still and doing nothing, then blaming the snow for the avalanche. The snow is subversive, it is evil, he curses. Damn the snow, it never had our good interests at heart. Escapist and illusionist is the least description we deserve. We are just incapable of accepting that the gigantic industrial, technological and economic rift that separates us from the West – whom many of us seek to antagonize – cannot be bridged overnight and that the West will not be overcome any time soon. Yet all we have ever managed to reciprocate were recipes for military defeats and blunders in a continuous circus of comedies that only gets more acrobatically sophisticated through folly after folly of idiotic and ruthless behavior. The tragic reign of Saddam and his cohorts since invading Iran until ending up at the dock inside a pulverized Iraq two and a half decades later is but a resounding case in point. The equally desperate theatrics of a similar regime to remain in power these days in Syria are evidence that the nauseating show still goes on with no end in sight.
If you are still with me at this stage, you will most probably persevere to the finish line. Hang in there, we’re almost done. As I said, entire libraries cannot suffice to articulate a full list of our failings as a people, but it does not harm to name a few. Another disastrous ingredient in our psychological make up – which we all know, but I might as well throw it in – has been our mass willingness to passionately endorse the dictates of religious authority without employing our rational faculties to investigate their authenticity, examine their impact on our well being, or question the eligibility of their propagators. The catastrophic consequences of this tendency cannot be overstated, especially when ignorance assumes a life of its own as a mainstream school of thought pervading society, and when metaphysical absurdities mushroom to impede progress and nullify the noble raison d’être of religions.

This highly contagious disease is not exclusive to Muslims – as the current manifestations of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism confirm – but we just happen to be the nation that has suffered most from its insanities. I used to say that religions are like nuclear energy. If not handled within the strictest scientific scrutiny, we’ll either end up with an intentional Hiroshima or an accidental Chernobyl. In the Arab world, the deadly radiation has indeed blinded us beyond cure, and only drastic and invasive surgery can now intervene to extinguish the uncontrollable inferno.
You probably have a turned stomach by now. Well I don’t blame you, but you also can’t say I didn’t caution you. What is my proposed road to salvation, you’re dying to know after having dragged you down to this paragraph? I claim to have none, and I will be lying if I said otherwise. My only medication is to keep saying these things. This is how I selfishly keep my own sanity. The more people who may think alike, the better the chances that one day we can hope to swim against the sweeping tide.

Tags: advice, philosophy, violence