The Middle East can break free of Western hegemony and internal ills

1994 Nelson Mandela declared a new era in South Africa. The rainbow nation was born, and South Africa started a momentous process towards reconciliation, stability and democracy. This was a moment of genius in history, not only because hope was triggered in the hearts of men and women of South Africa, but because that hope was maintained and sustained. A historical change took place in a society fragmented by apartheid, by blood and conflict. Regardless of the troubles it has, today’s South Africa moves towards a future of economic prosperity and political stability. Tahrir Square in 2011, was a similar moment when hope was triggered in the hearts and minds of people of this region. All Arabs felt that they had a chance to be liberated from tyranny and dictatorship. The liberation people in Tahrir hoped for was not just from a dark political legacy. They sought liberation from other aspects of their lives, and a way of out the closed worlds of knowledge, culture, tradition, and an end to sectarianism.

Tahrir Square became the arena where Muslims, Christians, secularists, leftists, Islamists and nationalists came together to celebrate values of freedom, democracy and hopes for a better future. This is how the Egyptians (and before that the Tunisians) and all the other nations in the Arab world showed the best in us. It had been there for generations but was not triggered and made public until then. Tahrir Square liberated us from all the bad memories, unbearable legacies and the deep depression that the nations of the Middle East, the Islamic World and the Arab World went through for decades.

Tahrir Square failed to bring the dawn of a new day. The Arab world was reborn in that moment of hope, inspiration, and genius. But it proved to be a still birth and a lot in us has changed. The best in us became the worst. The same nation and people who celebrated values, diversity and tolerance, who came together to imagine the future in a very positive way, have now turned to organise violence and institutionalised division. They choose to concentrate on death rather than on life, simply because hope was not sustained and eventually suffocated.

Geopolitics and history

How did we end up where we are today? Two paths meet at the crossroads: the geopolitical and historical paths. This region has created enormous vacuums in geopolitics. We have never transformed ourselves as other regions did after the end of the Cold War. The European Union, African Union, and other regional organisations across the world were created in order to establish new political and economic systems. However, we in the MENA region continued to be fragmented. The Arab League never succeeded in establishing any regional order, so it fell to nation states to do so. The so-called nation state had nothing to do with the concept of nation, or of the state. In the Arab world states were entities with artificial boundaries imposed on people in this region without legitimacy. As Azzam al-Tamimi says, our political order is more like concept of territorial states, since our states have never been national in essence.

In this part of the world, we have continued to embrace dangerous trends in geopolitics and foreign policy that were Western-centric. The assumption was that we can never be safe unless the Americans or some other world power protected us. Therefore, we continued to feel politically infantilised because we were trying to embed ourselves in their protective embrace. We were scared to break free from the Western world order or from the American hegemony in the region. The reasons for such strong ties were many. One of them was that our governments knew that domestic legitimacy was not enough to sustain sovereign independence. They needed a foreign crutch to support them in government and corrupt rule. They needed the Americans, they needed the Europeans, and they even needed the Russians. The rules of game were written in the 70s and they would still rather abide by them rather than go for the alternative which is real independence. For this of course they would need real legitimacy and that comes at a high cost. The cost of real independence is democratic transparency and sharing power. Rather than pay this price, the leaders chose to stick to the old paradigm of serving as proxies for international powers. This is the sin that our governments commit to this day.

The other factor is history. We cannot go on blaming the West for all the evil committed in our region. It certainly has played a major role in fostering extremism, and it is behind many of the ills that our society and our countries have experienced in the last century. However, I would like to talk about something else. The time has come for all of us, especially the people of Al Sharq, to talk openly and frankly about ourselves. We have to admit that Islamic doctrine has not had a reformation in the Lutheran sense of the word. Islamism has not had a spring board moment which we can call an “Enlightenment” or “Modernity of the Islamic World.”

There are many reasons for the absence of such milestones. I personally believe that the concept of modernity and enlightenment in the form of freedom, personal freedom, rational thinking and evolution of thought existed in Islamic civilisation, a long time before Western civilisation embraced these concepts. These concepts existed as a part of what we call the Ummah. In Islamic doctrine, our philosophers such as Al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, Al-Kindi and many others formulated and disseminated their own form of enlightenment and age of reason with a philosophical doctrine that was open and tolerant to rethinking everything, including the relationship between the God and man. We had Ilm Al-Kalam, a daring scholar. You would be shocked to read the works produced in the 9th or 10th centuries, to see how radical our philisophers were at the time in discussing the relationship between man and God, nature and God. This debate was before its time. Our intellectual history is the proof that we had our own Age of Reason and Enlightenment.

As far as modernity is concerned, the Islamic concept of tajdid – which means renewal not only of the role of religion in the judiciary and fiqh but in epistemology as well – operates as a driver of continuous reform. If you study what Imam al-Ghazali or even before him from Abu Hanifa up to Ibn Rushd, you would find in our intellectual history that there was one obvious track, the track of tajdid, the renewal. In the 16th and 17th European terminology you would call it the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, or the Reformation.

Two invasions: Mongols and Crusaders

Continuous and systemic renewal was interrupted for many reasons, one of which happened in the 4th century of Hijtra. There were in fact two catastrophes in the history of the Islamic world. The first was the Mongol invasion, which in Baghdad resulted in the destruction of the legacy of the Abbasids. The second was the arrival of the Crusaders, who divided the region up among themselves.

All these factors had a major effect on the collective psyche of the ummah. It came under such a heavy foreign threat, which was existential in nature, that it could not deal with in a simple military confrontation. This sense of foreign threat deepened with the arrival of the Crusaders because the Mongols eventually were Islamised, but the crusaders came to the region with a purpose of disseminating their religious doctrine. This generated the urgency with which the ummah felt it needed to protect itself. The concepts of renewal, tajdid and ijtihad, were put on the back burner, because the ummah felt that to conserve and consolidate rather than change and renew.

The ummah showed a renewed sense of aggression to those who challenged the status quo or historical legacy. As a result, we saw the rise of rigid hierarchies in the Islamic world, which did not exist in previous generations of Muslim societies. Sufi movements established their own hierarchy, although they remained decentralised. There was also Al-Azhar and many others who were trying to consolidate and cement the current moment rather than let it be diluted by something we were not sure of.

In the 16th and 17th century, European ideas and concepts reached the Muslim world under rising colonialism. They were never appreciated or loved, regardless of their positive or practical use, because they came with the guns that enslaved and confiscated land to establish European hegemonic dominance in the region. The reaction of the people of the region was to reject outsiders as well as their ideas because they would rather stick to their “old” rather than to embrace the outsider’s “new”. Their “old” was what made them who they were whereas the outsider’s “new” could deprive them of their own identity and make them become better slaves. The result of this colonial interaction was negative, and as Muslims we chose to close up ourselves and once again consolidate our identity under the influence of the “old”.