Arab Culture and Modernity – Tarek Heggy

Issue 2 | 19 May 2009

Tarek Heggy is an Egyptian businessman and intellectual, and perhaps the most prolific liberal writer in the Arab world. He is a no-holds-barred advocate of political and economic freedom and is both a leading liberal political thinker in the Arab world and International Petroleum Strategist. Tarek Heggy is also the author of Culture, Civilisation & Humanity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and his two new books – The Fall of Socialism; Arab Culture: Imprisoned and The Arab Cocoon will be released in 2010. Tarek Heggy addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 19 May 2009

ARAB CULTURE AND MODERNITY

TAREK HEGGY

My topic tonight suits me very much, since my most recent writings have been related to this subject. Arab Culture Imprisoned and The Arab Cocoon tackle the hysterical fear among many Arabs about modernity. Not all Arabs, but many Arabs. I will talk about this tonight.

I want to single out three key countries from the Middle East – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Middle Eastern but not Arabic-speaking Iran. I’ll look at these key countries from the perspective of modernity and how modernity is culturally perceived. Let me start with Egypt because it has a much longer track record of modernity.

Egypt

Egypt was a monarchy from 1805 to 1952. The founder of this era or reign was Muhummad Ali, who came from Albania. He founded the Muhummad Ali royal family. Although he was illiterate, he was fond of European values and European progress. He had French advisers. Muhummad Ali arrived in 1805, only four years after the French expedition (1798 to 1801) left Egypt.

Ali came with a lot of fascination for France. His French advisers told him that to have a strong patriotic Egyptian feeling you must have an Egyptian army. Also, you have to send Egyptians to Europe for education. And he did this. He established the first modern Egyptian army; he started sending people to France. Every five years there were Egyptians going to study engineering, architecture, irrigation, social sciences and the law in Europe.

These people returned to Egypt, as of 1826, and became basis of the middle class there. By the end of the century, we had nearly all the works of Molière, Voltaire and Greek masterpieces translated into Arabic by these people. These returned emigres influenced all domains and areas. They were admirers of the Greek-Roman heritage, French culture. As a result, Egypt introduced a French legal system in 1882, a copy of the Napoleonic civil and criminal code. It’s ironic. Egypt was occupied by the British in 1882 and introduced a French legal system in 1883. This suggests two things: Egyptians were very fond of France and Britain was not very keen on us.

So, in the end, we had a very high quality, middle class – people who had mastered English, French and European learning from the ancient to modernity. One blind man took out seven doctorates from French and Italian universities and taught ancient Greek and Latin. So the country was full of cultural dynamics, and had translated most of the masterpieces from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of the sons and daughters of my generation didn’t need to read in English and French; but today it is impossible to read the European classics unless you have access to books in English and French and unless you can read English and French.

So what happened to this journey with modernity? Firstly, it did not cover the entire Egyptian population. It created a high quality middle class but a thin middle class. It left the lower middle class, and the classes underneath, totally isolated, like any other Arab country. So that is why, when there was a military coup or a revolution, depending on how people see it, in 1952, the anti-Western traditionalists were welcomed by large numbers of Egyptians.

The new regime came no doubt with good intentions, but intentions are insufficient. What happened on the ground, from 1952 until today, was a complete deterioration of standards; political standards, economic standards and, the worst of all, educational standards. With economic decline and political deterioration, Egyptians started to talk a lot about modernity as an invasion. A book was published in 1969 for the first time using the words “cultural invasion”. With a high quality middle class, we never thought of modernity as an invasion. But, when standards deteriorated, people started to look at modernity as a cultural invasion – believing their culture could be stolen and colonised by modernity.

Today, Egypt has widely spread poverty, with socio-economic suffering, deteriorating cultural and educational standards with its citizens rejecting much from the advanced world, saying all that they need is the hardware of Western civilisation – the machines, cars, equipment. But, you cannot split the hardware of Western civilisation from the software, the culture and the educational environment behind it. And this is the problem.

Why Egypt?

Why have I started with Egypt? Because this is the country that will always have an impact on the region. Some 80 million people live in Egypt. Most of the authors of the books published in Arabic are from Egypt. There is nothing called a cinema industry in the Arab world except in Egypt, the Arabic cinema industry is an Egyptian industry. Most of the popular songs are either Egyptian or by Egyptian musicians. So this will always have an impact, positively or negatively.

To confirm the importance of Egyptian influence, and from the perspective of modernity in particular, when Muhammed Ali made Egypt fond of Europe in general and of France in particular, this was followed by the Syrians, by the Lebanese and by others. When Nassef came, whether we like or dislike what he did, he erased the slogans of socialism, and the slogans of socialists were erased in most of the region.

The same happened with Pan-Arabism. Egypt never considered itself part of the Pan-Arabist movement. The Pan-Arabist movement is mainly a Syrian/Lebanese movement established, amazingly and ironically, by Christians there, not Muslims. Why? Because they wanted a counter-balance to the Ottoman Empire which was mainly the leader of the Muslims. Educated Syrians and Lebanese once believed that a full citizen was distinguished only by speaking Arabic, not by being a Muslim. Now, by contrast, Arabic doesn’t exist in isolation from Islamism; it’s a satellite in the galaxy of Islamism.

I started with Egypt because it has an impact on the entire area. And now, Egypt has a problem with modernity. When I say Egypt, I don’t mean the country itself – I mean large numbers of people or the leading influences. These fear modernity. They believe it will take out their culture and replace it with another culture. And while there are people who write against this notion, their impact is not very strong.

I often make many comparisons between Egypt and Japan, except what happened to Japan is much worse than what happened to any Arab society; two nuclear bombs, complete defeat, Japan surrendered.  But, in spite of this, Japanese culture nearly remained the same – not fully, it lost some of its components – but it remained mainly a Japanese culture. Especially outside large cities. Modernity did not take the soul of Japan in spite of the tragic upheavals that nation underwent from August 1945. But, in Japan, the energy of the Japanese changed compass, or direction, from fighting and its energies went onto industry and manufacturing. They did as well in this as they did in their military expansions.

Saudi Arabia

Let’s look now at Saudi Arabia. I will go quickly through the history of what is called Saudi Arabia today. If we look at maps in 1850, there was nothing called Saudi Arabia. In 1744, a pact was formulated between two houses in a small town outside Riyadh, today the capital of Saudi Arabia. This pact was between two families and from this came the word Wa’habism. This was the beginning of the first Saudi dynasty that continued till 1818.

The main feature of this dynasty was a return the Islamic rules, as they were presented by Abdu Wahad and a very strong hostility to modernity and all the features of modernity. What ended this first Saudi dynasty was the Egyptian army, somewhat ironically. Moderate Islam and harsh Islam fought. Muhammad Ali sent his army with his first two sons, who failed. But the third son, in 1818, finished off the first Saudi dynasty, captured the ruler and sent him to Istanbul. He returned to power again, after a few years, but his dynasty ended in 1891 because of conflict inside the family.

But the Saudi family recovered from 1901 to 1925 and in 1925 they completed their expansion by adding the most important two names in Arabia – Mecca and Medina – to their territories. They defeated the royal family that is now in Jordan.

The Saudi old pact is still valid today – that the house of Saud would rule according to the jurisprudence and fatwa of the clergy, a very strict and radical clergy. It is the most radical interpretation of Islam. We should not be surprised that Saudi Arabia produced three of the terrorists in the 9/11 attack. The religious institution is part of the flesh of the system.

The Saudi government spends a great deal of money on the Islamic institutes and they are partners with Americans in some crimes. Who established the Arab Mujahadeen of Afghanistan? America and the Saudis. Why? Because it was one of the themes of the Cold War that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So if you are against the Soviet Union you are, by definition, with me. This was done by the Americans; and by Egypt’s Sadat, whose policies I have the highest respect for.

Sadat was a visionary man. He understood what was going on in the global political stage. But when he came to power in 1970 he found a country totally lefist, and a political arena fully in the hands of the left. He wanted to create equilibrium by opening the door to the Islamists and then, after eleven years, they killed him on 6 October 1981. The assassins were the very ones he allowed to participate in political life, especially through trade unions and universities, and especially in very critical areas like Upper Egypt, where he injected religious education into Christian areas like Asyut. Sadat’s attempt was to achieve a certain balance.

America tried this in Afghanistan; and those who worked with Americans against the Soviets are now working against the Americans – that is the name of the game. People that claim they possess the absolute truth will never make compromises. They will continue on their own, because they believe, “We have the truth, we own it all. We are right and others are wrong. There are two ways: our way, and the wrong way.”

Iran

Iran is a very special society, with a lot of complexity. It had, like Egypt, a very high quality middle class before the regime changed after the Shah when it fled the chaos. Today, Iran is totally in the hands of the clerics. I was in Kuwait two weeks ago and spent time with four Iranian professors who had relocated there. The four of them had the same reason for leaving Iran – after every lecture at their university, the religious police would interrogate them about what they had said by way of any positive comments about America, secularism or modernity.

Iran is in the hands of the clergy. I personally believe it will remain in the hands of the clergy for at least another ten years. The most important political figure in Iran is not the President, it is the head of the clergy, a man who is in good health, aged in his sixties, and he can continue for a while.  He is the successor to Khomeni.

My four professors, separately, gave me the very strong message that it is not the interest of the regime in Iran to open up. Obama may be kind, but not to them. The world’s problems will not be sorted out by being polite and kind to people. There are much deeper problems than PR can handle. I got the message that Iran cannot afford to open up. It is well protected as such. Everything is under control of the clergy, and they will not give up that easily.

Modernity – what chance?

So the chances of modernity in Iran are probably the same as the chances of modernity in Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, the chances are better, but also in a critical state. One could add Turkey to this, but it would be a totally different case. Turkey had a good journey with modernity, from 1924 – when Ataturk cancelled the Caph – till ten years ago. There was a very good system. But it’s a very particular system, one that cannot be replicated.

If we take Egypt’s army, for example, and compare it with Turkey’s, Egypt is very different. The army in Egypt doesn’t play the same role as in Turkey, where it protects secularism. So if Turkey moves, it might move forward to have a better chance at the EU. If it moves backward it loses that chance. Turkey also has problems in being allowed into the EU because of its difficulties over its Kurdish population. The problem has to be sorted out before Turkey can be integrated.

So Turkey is like Egypt but on a very different scale. A country that did very well with modernity but is now it is at a crossroads. Maybe because it is an Islamic government that has not stepped on the red lines yet, they have kept the secular system and democratic machinery. I personally do not expect it to go backward. The chances of it going forward are much better than it going backward. It would be very positive for the Muslim world to see Turkey doing well with a so-called Islamic government, but it is like the Christian Democratic Party in Germany. In Turkey, what does Islamic mean? A name and a value system, but not systems and mechanisms.

Overall, in the Islamic Middle Eastern world, the chances of modernity are not very high. And what are the obstacles in all these cases? They are the following. Firstly there is the spread of an intolerant interpretation of Islam. In every one of these societies this phenomenon exists but in different degrees. In Egypt, one can certainly say that there was a much more tolerant interpretation of Islam 40 or 50 years ago than what has spread culturally today. Saudi Arabia is probably somewhere between very hardline to hardline. Iran is a very hardline, intolerant, Islamic atmosphere. The outdated and radical interpretations of Islam form the first obstacle between these societies and modernity.

The second obstacle is related to education. In most of these countries, education was politicised, and has never been a free education.  A liberal education was never allowed. You need an educated middle class to have modernity. Modernity needs safeguards and the safeguards are the liberally educated sons and daughters of the middle class. The third obstacle is the widely spread fear of modernity that is injected mainly by religious institutions. I will go back and talk about each of these.

Obstacles

There is nothing called “Islam” in absolute terms, or “Christianity” in absolute terms, or “Judaism” in absolute terms. My evidence is that Christianity today is not a copy of Christianity ten centuries ago. So Christianity in Europe in the tenth century is totally different from Christianity today. Judaism itself is different from the books. It was given a chance to be reintroduced and represented in a way that you can talk about a gap between the literal meaning of the text and the current Jewish heritage or culture.

Islam is the same. From the first day onwards, there were different interpretations, from very flexible to very radical. From the extreme right, to the extreme left. But the important thing is that, for twelve centuries, the mainstream was modern Islam. And there are many Jewish scholars who say that the best time for Jews in the Middle Ages was in Spain with the Arabs. So mainstream Islam was tolerant, and was modern. There were always very hardline interpretations, but they were the minority.

What happened in the last 200 years was that they swapped. The hardliners moved to become the mainstream and the mainstream moved backward, or was pushed to the shade by the deterioration of educational, cultural and political standards. Today we can name hundreds of Islamic centres anywhere, in America, Europe, in Australia, which we will find are financed by one school of thinking. Staff were recruited by one school of thinking and they have been advocating the same version of Islam – radical Islam.

What happened was that the radical, marginal school of Islam got oil, and the moderate Islam got the deterioration of standards without the oil. And even if you have a group of moderate Muslims in Egypt that would like to spread their interpretation of Islam, they don’t have the resources that some oil countries have. Some countries can build Islamic centres from California to Australia and send Imams – you know some of them, and how highly unintellectual they are. We feel very disgraced by them in Egypt when we hear from thousands of kilometres what they advocate. We don’t like to hear that an Egyptian in Australia says such things.

The experience that was marginal had the sand dunes of East Arabia and the oil revenues behind it. It can advocate anything now with this money. Then when you are Egypt or Turkey, with their political and socio-economic problems, you go backward. And you get invaded because money talks – it sounds simple but this is what happened.

Most Arab societies got liberated from different types of European occupation between 1950 and 1970. They ended up, mostly but not all, in the hands of either medieval monarchists or military juntas that allowed the deterioration of standards to continue to further and lower levels. Meanwhile, someone else is rich enough to finance and advocate his more radical understanding.

The key players are Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran. What happens in each of these places will form the future of the region. The region that produced religion, oil and gas. All of them are inflammable, including number one.

We have two scenarios, theoretically – from upwards downward or from grassroots upwards. From upwards to downwards is most unlikely. It could happen in some countries but not in most because there is no interest to develop. What is needed is to reform education; to go from the education of the answers to the education of the questions. To go to critical minds. To activate criticism and self criticism; to activate the culture of asking questions, which is not the culture in most Arab societies.

Most of the regimes in the Arab Middle East do not want to produce this sort of citizen. This is very much a trouble making citizen. A citizen of a liberal education pushes a society to financial and political accountability. You won’t see political and financial accountability except in democracies; there is no other way. An autocratic system will never spend time, money and effort creating criticism for themselves.

From downwards upwards is very difficult, but not impossible. That is why the world should deal more with societies and civil society organisations more than states. Change will never happen except from within the society. Nobody does the right thing because he was asked to do the right thing unless he is convinced himself.

The way forward will come from within the civil society. If half of American aid went to civil society it could be very productive. These societies are political bonuses to political stands. The world should deal, at least partly, with the organisations of civil society; these are the ones that have the energy and interest to move; to move on education, on the status of human rights and women’s rights.

It is very difficult when someone asks me, are you optimistic? I do not know – am I optimistic or pessimistic or somewhere in between? It is a very complicated situation, an area that is inflammable, dangerous, full of emotions, blood, revenge heritage – and for centuries. My duty was to paint the picture for you, not to beautify it.