Arab Nations Must Learn From History

By Sobhi Ghandour,
Special to Gulf News
Published: October 19, 2008, 00:03
Courtesy Of GulfNews

The Arab nation enjoys the most important strategic location in the world, at the gateway of Asia and Africa and close to most of Europe. The Arab region is also the land of rich natural resources, the most important of which is oil - one of the main pillars of global economy.

Furthermore, the Arab nation is the land of divine messages and hosts the holy shrines of divine religions, which created a special relation between Arab culture and the Islamic world.

Arab Muslims are considered the leaders and reference of non-Arab Muslims all over the world, although they only comprise one fifth of the Islamic world's population.

So, taking control of the Arab region by any foreign party means seizing control of a significant strategic location and the world's most important natural resources, as well as of important religious shrines and centres.

Europeans waged their colonial wars against the Arab region for more than 200 years under the label of the crusades and on the pretext of the existence of Christian religious centres in the region.

On the other hand, the Ottoman Empire maintained its control over the Arab region for more than 400 years in the name of the Islamic Caliphate.

In fact, great powers deal with the Arab region as an integral unit within the framework of one strategic plan that targets the region as a whole.

Meanwhile, the Arab world was divided into more than 20 countries following international accords and arrangements between the four great European powers in the early 19th century.

This state of division has led to the scattering of Arab financial and human capabilities and to the difficulty of creating an Arab force capable of facing outside challenges or playing an influential regional role.

It also led to the weakness of security and the disability of Arabs to manage their crises and conflicts, as a pretext to seek assistance form foreign powers to solve their problems.

Today, the Arab nation is passing through similar conditions to what they faced 100 years ago, and is stepping into a new stage similar to what followed the First World War when many Arab countries became under international custodianship.

This makes one ask: Why did West European countries realise the importance of their unity, despite their multi-cultural, ethnic and social backgrounds, and a history full of wars and bloody conflicts, while Arabs have not realised the importance of their unity yet?

Why did these countries succeed in developing different kinds of cooperation between them in the past sixty years, while the Arab League failed to do so, although the Arab league and the European union were established in the same period? Does this not mean that the problem lies with the absence and misuse of the Arab political decision, and not with suitable conditions of available capabilities?

This is simply because points of common factors of unity between Arabs are much more than those between European Union countries.

Rectifying the mistakes of the past does not mean forsaking cooperation and federal integration, which maintain the national characters of each country, just like the European Union.

It simply means fixing the damages in the Arab political body and governments, as well as in the planning, legislative and monitory bodies, while preserving the target of Arab integration regardless of methods or mistakes.

European Experience

Another lesson to be learned from the European experience is that all these countries are governed by democratic bodies. The decision to join the EU is subject to public referendum in each country, and is never imposed.

Powerful European countries do not take over smaller countries, which is a lesson that Arabs must learn from their history and that of other people.

The responsibilities of intellectuals, academicians and scholars are similar to those they had at the early 19th century, when some of them were defending European modernisation of the region, while others defended the Ottoman Empire, justified its mistakes and held onto the dream of returning to the Islamic Caliphate.

Very few chose to highlight the mistakes of both the Ottoman Empire and the European colonialism.

The Islamic reformers, including Jamal Al Deen Al Afghani, Mohammad Abduh, Abdul Rahman Al Kawakibi, called for reforming Arab and Islamic thinking and identity as the only way to build a better future.

They also called for freeing the ideology from preconceptions and intellectual molds and stagnation, as well as getting rid of wrong traditions that deprived women from their civil and social rights.

However, these thoughts were confined to books and never turned into a popular movement for comprehensive change. The Arab society remained caught between two extreme ideologies, the first of which calls for western modernisation, while the second calls for return to the Salafi era.

The mistakes made in the past century are repeated now. Arabs still fail to reach a common future project, although they share a common view of the current situation of the Arab nation.

Nowadays, many political analysts discuss the nation's present, while many are holding onto the past. However, there are very few who prepare the nation for a better future.

It is very important for Arabs to learn from others' experiences and draw conclusion, like what Europeans did right after the Second World War, when they started laying the grounds for their democratic union.

Sobhi Ghandour is Director of Al Hewar Centre in Washington