INTERVIEW. When the Arab Spring broke out ten years ago, it was with high hopes for a brighter future. But the uprising was doomed from the start, according to Egyptian author and political thinker Tarek Heggy.
Layal Freije speaks with Egyptian author and political thinker Tarek Heggy.
The locked-in Arab Mind
When the Arab Spring broke out 10 years ago, it was with great hopes and dreams of a brighter future with human rights and democracy. But the uprising was doomed from the start, says Egyptian writer and political thinker Tarek Heggy, who already in the years leading up to the revolution foresaw why the Arab mind is not ready for an upheaval.
Istanbul, Turkey - Take a map of the Middle East and look at it. Name all the countries where the Arab Spring sowed a hope for democracy and human rights, and then assess the state of the countries now, ten years after the revolution.
It is the acclaimed Egyptian liberal writer and political thinker, Tarek Heggy, who suggests that I take a map and study it closely. In fact, he urges anyone talking about the 2011 revolution to look at a map of the Middle East if they want to understand how wrong things went in Yemen, Libya, Egypt and Syria - even in Tunisia, which is otherwise highlighted as an example of a successful revolution, where religious forces have since gained traction.
On the map you can see how the countries together form a semicircle along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, a semicircle marked by poverty, chaos and, in the worst cases, war. A semicircle in crisis.
"Many people in Europe talk about the failure of the Arab Spring, as if it could have been a success at all. I would argue that success could not have been possible at all."
Tarek Heggy is known for not mincing words when he talks about the Middle East and especially his native Egypt. For 30 years he has dealt with ideologies, religion, and politics in the Arab world, and has written countless works in which he tries to explain why the Arab world is "backward," as he calls it. And why modernity and progress in the Middle East have not kept pace with the developments that have taken place in the West.
The year before the Arab Revolution, Tarek Heggy published the book The Arab Cocoon in 2010, and shortly after the revolution first took root in Egypt in 2011, the book The Arab Mind Bound followed. Two works in continuation of each other, which without mentioning the demonstrations that would later spread in the Middle East, explained why a successful system of change in large parts of the region cannot be done through a revolt strictly from scratch.
Two heavy chains
If you want to understand why the uprising failed - and why the situation today in several places is even worse than before the revolution, you must look at what Tarek Heggy calls "the Arab mind." You cannot talk about the Arab Spring without also talking about the Arab mind, he states. The two things are connected, and this is where one finds the answer to why the revolution was doomed to fail.
Arab culture is bound by two heavy chains, Heggy believes. The first chain is due to the forms of Islam that have been promoted in the Middle East: the radical Wahhabism that originated in Saudi Arabia and the political Islam advanced by the Muslim Brotherhood. The second chain is the dysfunctional education system, which is specifically tied up in religious ideologies, and which thus prevents the population from learning to think independently and critically.
"There is a need for hard work on education and religious institutions because they are extremely dangerous," said Tarek Heggy. He cites the religious university Al-Azhar in Cairo, which is affiliated with the mosque of the same name, as an example of one of the entrenched problems in Arab communities. Al-Azhar works as an institution to promote religion in Egypt, operates more than 8,000 educational institutions across the country (according to latest figures), and has a religious influence on Muslims throughout the region.
"Al-Azhar's power is due to the low level of education. There are 100 million people in Egypt. One third of them are illiterate, and two thirds are called educated, but one can still ask questions about their education. They can read and write, but that does not mean that they are educated," says Tarek Heggy.
To this must be added the many millions of Friday sermons that take place every week in the Middle East. As long as religion and state are not separated, political Islam will have power over education. The population is not encouraged to think either freely or critically, and this helps to keep the religion - and thus the region - locked in a certain negative pattern. One ends up in a spiral of ignorance that never ends.
"Just look at the reaction to the name Darwin in the Arab world. People get excited if you just mention Darwin - and they know very little about what Darwin's theories are about. They react like that because it sounds hostile to religion. Religion is their salvation. It is the promise of a better life."
When at the same time one has a culture that educates its citizens to believe that their misfortune is due to the enemy - that it is US foreign policy that oppresses the region, that Israel is a constant threat, that capitalism steals from the Muslim countries, and that colonialism put an end to progress - is it even harder to get countries to take the step towards what Tarek Heggy calls ‘modernity’, as has already been done in the West.
"I have always opposed the claim that many people repeat: that our problems are created outside our borders. That may be true to some degree. But principally and mainly we are the ones to blame. Our problems have roots in our own countries. They are related to our leaders, our religious institutions, our social inequality and the lack of opportunities for a large part of society," says Tarek Heggy, who believes that the Middle East needs to look inward instead of exalting and romanticizing the past.
God's enemies
One should not misunderstand Tarek Heggy. He is not a critic of Islam. He does not believe that Islam is the root of all evil in the Middle East. He talks about the politicized Islam, the one that has found its way into the educational institutions, the civil service and all the way to the core of power that is holding back the region.
The Arab Spring could never have been a success as it required a population ready to take over when governments fell. But the people were not trained to build what they had overthrown.
On the other hand, the Islamist forces were ready to take power, Tarek Heggy believes, and calls for a re-examination of the map and the state of affairs in several places in the Middle East. Many Arab countries today are markedly influenced by political Islam in one form or another - this applies to both countries that have been hit by war in recent years and those that fought for a revolution in 2011.
"Iraq is influenced by political Islam, sometimes it is Shia Muslims who decide, other times it is Sunni. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood has many followers. We cannot deny that political Islam plays a role in the region. It has even reached Tunisia."
One of the clearest examples is in Tarek Heggy's own homeland Egypt, where the now deceased political leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi, took power in the country in 2012, shortly after then-President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown by the masses. Back then, the Brotherhood preached about a brighter future. But Tarek Heggy did not believe it. "Religious parties believe they represent God and will not pass the power on to anyone they believe is God's enemy," he says.
"When Morsi was elected, I thought it was my personal finale. I have spent 30 years of my life writing about modernity. I have written 34 books and hundreds of essays with a recurring theme: modernity. The choice of Morsi meant that I had wasted 30 years of my life writing.
Counter-revolution
In 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was overthrown and Mohamed Morsi imprisoned. At the time, it was not the people who caused the regime change, but the military, led by the current president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Today, the situation in Egypt is, on many parameters, worse than under Mubarak.
Admittedly, new roads and large buildings are being built, but it has become more dangerous to demonstrate, journalists are imprisoned for writing critically about the regime, and in 2019 al-Sisi changed the constitution so that he can remain in office in the first instance until 2030. Things are no better in Syria and Yemen, which are considered by the international community to be two of the greatest humanitarian disasters of recent times. In Libya, the civil war is raging, while Tunisia is suffering from an acute economic crisis.
The revolution was a failure. It developed in several countries into a counter-revolution that exacerbated the situation. But what does the future hold for the people of the Middle East? Is it as dystopian as the time immediately after the Arab Spring?
"It depends on where on the map you look," says Tarek Heggy. "If you move your eyes away from the semicircle and towards other parts of the region, you will be able to point to countries that are actually making progress. But here it is worth noting what types of countries are in question."
"People do not ask why the Arab Spring took place in the republics, but not in the monarchies. That is a very important issue," he said.
"It turns out that monarchies are better at serving their people. Saudi Arabia did not have an Arab Spring, the United Arab Emirates did not have an Arab Spring. Bahrain had a short one, but it was more about religion than anything else. It was the Sunni Muslims and the Shia Muslims who disagreed," he says.
Tarek Heggy acknowledges that it is a "strange phenomenon" that it is precisely the rich Arab monarchies - which in addition to oil money are most known for conservative interpretations of Islam, oppression of women and human rights violations - where the population is most satisfied with their governments in the Middle East. But there is a good reason for that. While political Islam is still a problem in the monarchies, something else is happening in relation to education.
"The country where most people are applying for master’s degrees and PhDs in the Arab world is Saudi Arabia. And those people have an impact on society because they contribute with a quality education."
Tarek Heggy does not believe that monarchies are an ideal form of government in the region. The Middle Eastern monarchies do not live up to human rights on several parameters. But the political Islam that characterizes the Arab kingdoms seems to work better in countries ruled by emirs because they ultimately have the last word over the imams. In the republics, power lies with the military and the religious political parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Combined with a general lack of freedom and proper education, it has caused the development experienced in the monarchies to stagnate in the republics.
"In Egypt, it is sometimes as if the state is competing with the Islamists to show they are more Islamist than the Islamists," says Tarek Heggy, giving an example.
"Before the month of Ramadan in mid-April, several members of the Egyptian parliament talked about criminalizing eating in public places during Ramadan. In contradistinction, there was a decree in the United Arab Emirates that allowed restaurants to serve food to guests during the holy month."
There are several such examples in the monarchies, says Tarek Heggy. Among other things, a man in Saudi Arabia can no longer be divorced from his wife without informing her that they are now divorced. As in other countries, a divorce must now go through the public system.
When President al-Sisi tried to introduce a similar law in Egypt it failed, despite being a small and harmless change of law. The day after the proposal, he received a message from Al-Azhar that religion was their territory, and he should not intervene.
The spiral of ignorance
While the monarchies, according to Heggy, seem to be taking small steps toward modernity, his reading of the future is "not very optimistic" when it comes to the republics.
"There is a good reason why the Muslim Brotherhood has a strong presence in the Arab republics and not in the monarchies. This is because there are similarities between the way the military and the Muslim Brotherhood are thinking about things."
Before the political system in the republics can really change, religion must be made a private matter and the states must be governed on the basis of secular values, Tarek Heggy believes. This was seen in Tunisia in the middle of the 20th century under President Habib Bourguiba, and in 1923 when Kemal Ataturk, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, announced that the Republic of Turkey would no longer be ruled by Islam.
Back then, it was not the people's own choice, but the leaders, that enforced secularism. And that, according to Tarek Heggy, is not the right way to do it. That is why today one experiences sympathy for Islamist forces in Tunisia and Turkey, where the latter has taken great strides away from secularism. According to Heggy, secularization must take place from scratch. It is the people who must want it if it is to really make a difference.
It may sound like Tarek Heggy is contradicting himself. A successful revolution requires critically thinking citizens, but as long as education is governed by religious institutions, the citizens are not trained to think independently. To separate religion from the state, however, the citizens themselves must want secularism. And then we are back to the vicious spiral of ignorance. That's what Tarek Heggy means when he talks about the locked-in Arab mind.
He does not rule out that new hopes and new revolts may flare up in the republics again. After all, the people understand well that better and richer societies exist in the world. But a new uprising will in all probability be another failure, says Tarek Heggy.
"The masses can easily destroy a building. But if they do not possess the right knowledge, they will not be able to build a better one."
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