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Why Does In The Middle East Remain Rooted In The Middle Ages?

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  • Why Does In The Middle East Remain Rooted In The Middle Ages?

    WHY DOES LIFE IN THE MIDDLE EAST REMAIN ROOTED IN THE MIDDLE AGES?
    By Robert Fisk

    AZG DAILY
    04-09-2009

    Opinion

    According to a UN report, the global improvement in living standards
    has passed much of the Arab world by. Robert Fisk explains why

    Why is the Arab world - let us speak with terrible sharpness - so
    backward? Why so many dictators, so few human rights, so much state
    security and torture, so terrible a literacy rate?

    Why does this wretched place, so rich in oil, have to produce,
    even in the age of the computer, a population so poorly educated,
    so undernourished, so corrupt? Yes, I know the history of Western
    colonialism, the dark conspiracies of the West, the Arab argument
    that you cannot upset the sheikhs and the kings and the autocrats,
    the imams and the emirs when the "enemy is at the gates". There is
    some truth to that. But not enough truth.

    Once more the United Nations Development Programme has popped up
    with yet one more, its fifth, report that catalogues - via Arab
    analysts and academics, mark you - the retarded state of much of the
    Middle East. It talks of "the fragility of the region's political,
    social, economic and environmental structures... its vulnerability
    to outside intervention". But does this account for desertification,
    for illiteracy - especially among women - and the Arab state which,
    as the report admits, is often turned "into a threat to human security,
    instead of its chief support"?

    As Arab journalist Rami Khouri stated bleakly last week: "How we
    tackle the underlying causes of our mediocrity and bring about real
    change anchored in solid citizenship, productive economies and stable
    statehood, remains the riddle that has defied three generations of
    Arabs." Real GDP per capita in the region - one of the statistics
    which truly shocked Khouri - grew by only 6.4 per cent between 1980
    and 2004. That's just 0.5 per cent annually, a rate which 198 of 217
    countries analysed by the CIA World Factbook bet - which stood at
    150 million in 1980 - will reach 400 million in 2015.

    I notice much of this myself. When I first came to the Middle East
    in 1976, it was crowded enough. Cairo's steaming, fetid streets were
    already jam-packed, night and day, with up to a million homeless living
    in the great Ottoman cemeteries. Arab homes are spotlessly clean but
    their streets are often repulsive, dirt and ordure spilling on to
    the pavements. Even in beautiful Lebanon, where a kind of democracy
    does exist and whose people are among the most educated and cultured
    in the Middle East, you find a similar phenomenon. In the rough hill
    villages of the south, the same cleanliness exists in every home. But
    why are the streets and the hills so dirty?

    I suspect that a real problem exists in the mind of Arabs; they do not
    feel that they own their countries. Constantly coaxed into effusions
    of enthusiasm for Arab or national "unity", I think they do not feel
    that sense of belonging which Westerners feel. Unable, for the most
    part, to elect real representatives - even in Lebanon, outside the
    tribal or sectarian context - they feel "ruled over". The street, the
    country as a physical entity, belongs to someone else. And of course,
    the moment a movement comes along and - even worse - becomes popular,
    emergency laws are introduced to make these movements illegal or
    "terrorist". Thus it is always someone else's responsibility to look
    after the gardens and the hills and the streets.

    And those who work within the state system - who work directly for
    the state and its corrupt autarchies - also feel that their existence
    depends on the same corruption upon which the state itself thrives. The
    people become part of the corruption. I shall always remember an
    Arab landlord, many years ago, bemoaning an anti-corruption drive by
    his government. "In the old days, I paid bribes and we got the phone
    mended and the water pipes mended and the electricity restored," he
    complained. "But what can I do now, Mr, Robert? I can't bribe anyone
    - so no 002, was deeply depressing. It identified three cardinal
    obstacles to human development in the Arab world: the widening
    "deficit" in freedom, women's rights and knowledge. George W Bush -
    he of enduring freedom, democracy, etc etc amid the slaughter of Iraq
    - drew attention to this. Understandably miffed at being lectured to
    by the man who gave "terror" a new name, even Hosni Mubarak of Egypt
    (he of the constantly more than 90 per cent electoral success rate),
    told Tony Blair in 2004 that modernisation had to stem from "the
    traditions and culture of the region".

    Will a solution to the Arab-Israeli war resolve all this? Some of
    it, perhaps. Without the constant challenge of crisis, it would be
    much more difficult to constantly renew emergency laws, to avoid
    constitutionality, to distract populations who might otherwise demand
    overwhelming political change. Yet I sometimes fear that the problems
    have sunk too deep, that like a persistently leaking sewer, the ground
    beneath Arab feet has become too saturated to build on.

    I was delighted some months ago, while speaking at Cairo University -
    yes, the same academy which Barack Obama used to play softball with
    the Muslim world - to find how bright its students were, how many
    female students crowded the classes and how, compared to previous
    visits, well-educated they were. Yet far too many wanted to move to
    the West. The Koran may be an invaluable document - but so is a Green
    Card. And who can blame them when Cairo is awash with PhD engineering
    graduates who have to drive taxis?

    And on balance, yes, a serious peace between Palestinians and
    Israelis would help redress the appalling imbalances that plague Arab
    society. If you can no longer bellyache about the outrageous injustice
    that this war represents, then perhaps there are other injustices
    to be addressed. One of them is domestic violence, which - despite
    the evident love of family which all Arabs demonstrate - is far more
    prevalent in the Arab world than Westerners might realise (or Arabs
    want to adm iddle East. By all means, send the Arabs our teachers,
    our economists, our agronomists. But bring our soldiers home. They do
    not defend us. They spread the same chaos that breeds the injustice
    upon which the al-Qa'idas of this world feed. No, the Arabs - or,
    outside the Arab world, the Iranians or the Afghans - will not produce
    the eco-loving, gender-equal, happy-clappy democracies that we would
    like to see. But freed from "our" tutelage, they might develop their
    societies to the advantage of the people who live in them. Maybe the
    Arabs would even come to believe that they owned their own countries.
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