Page 1 of 2 SPEAKING FREELY How prosperity destroyed Arabic culture
By Mahboob A Khawaja
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The Arab people live in a fantasy bubble being floated by the transitory oil revenues, controlled and managed by the Western nations. Oil revenues are not the outcome of Arab's hard work but a planned scheme of things carried out for several generations to distract from the real problems. The aim is to destroy the Arab culture and civilization with delusional prosperity instead of poverty.
Poor people always maintain life with conscience, and think and
strive to survive, but prosperity gives them false amenities without working for it to ultimately become useless and die on their own without external intervention. Arabs have lost the moral and intellectual capacity to think intelligently of the self, about their culture, their global presence and about their future.
With massive killings, daily bloodbaths across the Arab world, the leaders are happy that people are occupied in their own follies and that America and Britain are sheltering their role-playing with increased militarization of the Arab world.
All major public institutions in the Arab world are dominated by the Western thinking and agents of influence. The tragedy of Arab authoritarianism and economic militarization of the oil producing Arab nations is more complex and full of individualistic horrors, societal complacency and political blunders.
Almost at every opportunity offered by time and history, the absolute rulers took wrong turns and slipped into the vices and ruins of self-generated corruption. The US and some of the West European nations have played central roles in institutionalizing the authoritarian corruption.
The new educated and thinking generations of Arabs must make a navigational change and set priorities to detach the economy and politics from the oil-fed thinking and consequential militarization and interdependency on the Western nations into social and economic-political reconstruction of the Arab societies for a sustainable future.
Time and history shall not wait for their tangible actions but they should be conscientiously powerful and skilled enough in time management to share a new and moving vision and to plan strategies and actions for a new Arab world dedicated to informed and responsible people's governance and living in harmony with the rest of the global community.
In 1920, Robert Briffault, professor at Cambridge University (The Making of Humanity), made the following historical observation:
It was under the influence of Arabian and Moorish revival of culture and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. ... It is highly probable that but for the Arabs modern European civilization would never have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution. For although there is not a single aspect of European growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world and the supreme source of its victory.
For almost 800 years, the Arabs produced an advanced civilization morally, intellectually and scientifically unparalleled in modern history. When the Europeans lived in the dark ages and fought between themselves for nationalistic identities and symbols, the Arabs were the most progressive people, articulating a model civilization to pursue balanced human development (material and spiritual) to give meanings to freedom, peace and equality and clear purpose to a global sense of humanity called Ummah.
The message of Islam was meant for the whole of the mankind to be one humanity living on one planet in peace and progress. But when the Europeans' crusades colonized the Islamic world, they destroyed Islamic institutions and divided the Arabs and Muslims and made them fight for their existence as was their own history of the European cultures.
Despite the oil-generated paper wealth and transitory economic prosperity, Arab people lack Islamic unity and force of being one Ummah to restore their own historical linkage to change and human progress. Western media views them as a source of entertainment and one-track business deals to sell obsolete weapons and consumer products but not as valuable partners in a global community.
We live in an information age of images carved up by the few for business and human exploitation. Western media networks portray their own manufactured images of the contemporary Arab and Muslim world - more so of the oil-exporting Arab nations - twisting tail of the camel, women covered in burkas or splendid shopping malls full of walking black veils versus bikinis.
The past decade has occupied the minds and strategic priorities of Western leaders in their support of the War on Terrorism. Terrorism originates from the Western colonial powers but none would dare to concede it for the fear of unknown intellectual, moral and political consequences in contemporary history.
When the European businessmen explored new world markets for diminishing resources and their armed forces invaded and occupied the vast Islamic world, there were no television, Internet, video cameras and stone-throwing public and voices of reason to call them foreign mercenaries, aggressors and terrorists.
The colonization scheme of things was not the outcome of the Western democratic values to spread freedom, liberty and justice but ferocity of violence and killings of millions and millions of human beings for the Empires to be built on colored bloodbaths.
The European crusaders crossed the channels and unknown time zones to subjugate the much divided Muslim people as part of their superior nationalism perception and values that Muslims were inferior to the European race and could be used as subjects without human identity and as raw material to build the new Empires.
Many centuries past, if there was a global organization like the UN, it would not have dared to call the European intruders terrorists because it would have been their own organization as Muslims lived in slavery and denial of basic human rights and identity. In an information age, knowledge - driven global culture of reason, ignorance is no longer a requisite to learn from the living history.
British author and producer Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear: A BBC documentary challenging the American version of the "War on Terrorism"), spells out the myth with clarity:
"international terrorism is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media."
Ron Suskand - a White House insider shares intriguing and fact-digging perspectives how George W Bush acted like an egomaniac and sadistic president and his immediate colleagues looking for excuses to re-enact the crusade against the Muslim World.
Many Arab and Muslim rulers were willing partners and complacent in this project to safeguard their powerhouses and to ensure continuity of the neo-colonial governance. America lives in continued insecurity maintained by the corporate world and instigated by the former Bush administration. Paul Craig Roberts ("9/11 After A Decade: Have We Learned Anything?" Global Research) shares the prevalent perspective:
Today Americans are unsafe, not because of terrorists and domestic extremists, but because they have lost their civil liberties and have no protection from unaccountable government power. One would think that how this came about would be worthy of public debate and congressional hearings.
In a peak oil stage, the prosperity oil bubble is fast diminishing and the illusion of borrowed happiness and good time is already in ruins. Human development was neglected and economic man and women could not generate the Darwinian scenario of change and development.
All of the Arab Middle East more so the oil exporting nations consist of the client states managed by puppets rulers, hand picked by the ex-European colonial masters and transferred onward to the US political hegemony. The trade-off was kept under check by the subsequent US administrations to launch economic development programs and make the Arab societies believe that they are progressive and will have new prosperous "imaginative communities" carved out of the dry and non-productive and ruined deserts by time and history.
The real game was to ensure continued supplies of cheap oil to the Western military-industrialized complexes and in return militarization of the Arab Middle East under the aegis of fraudulent illusion of economic development and prosperity.
The strategy was that one war will destroy the economic infrastructures and another follow-up planned scheme will rebuild them to be destroyed again by another emerging conflict. For over a decade, the unending and bogus War on Terrorism continues throughout the Arab world onward to Pakistan.
Daily bloodbaths and torture of the people paint a picture of the Arabs as if living in the draconian age without any recourse to civilization, reason and Islamic system of governance. Was the discovery of oil a conspiracy ("Fitna") to dehumanize the Arabs and Muslim people and to destroy their sense of originality, culture and values?
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