If you read a serious book on Middle East affairs, prior to 2010, you would probably end up with this two-sentence synopsis: “If there is any free and fair election in a Middle East country today, Islamists will get the majority in parliament. And if there is any free and fair election in the Middle East today, groups hostile to the US and the West will bag the majority of votes.”
These two sentences, which you may probably find in a good number of books and articles written on the Middle East before 2010, are not valid any more. After what has happened since 2011 in Egypt, Tunisia and is happening in Libya today, the public’s perception has changed. The trust in Islamist political groups and the animosity towards the West are no longer there.
A cry for reforming religious discourse is almost everywhere. I have been writing on this subject for a while now and I am delighted that finally, this point has been recognised by political leaders publicly. Both the outgoing president of Egypt, Adly Mansour, and the new president, Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, in their recent public speeches referred almost to the same idea, with almost the same words. Al Sissi said: “Religious discourse is the greatest battle and challenge facing the Egyptian people, pointing to the need for a new vision and a modern, comprehensive understanding of the religion of Islam — rather than relying on a discourse that has not changed for 800 years.”
Yesterday, even King Mohammad VI of Morocco presented the “Support Plan” for religious management at the local level. This plan aims to protect mosques in the country from exploitation and improve the level of training in the service of religious values.
For three to four decades, politics in Middle East has wrongly been mixed with religion. Some analysts interpreted it as a reaction to the humiliating defeat the Arab armies suffered during the 1967 Six Days War with Israel. Some others believed it was due to the rejection of western values by Arabs, as they have bad memories of western colonialism and the loss of Palestine. For whatever reasons, the mosques, schools, media etc in all Middle East countries were saturated with the wrong religious values and attitudes, harking back to what they said was the “Arab Golden Age” or what was painted as a glorious time. A whole generation was raised on hatred, rejection of others and a degradation of civilised values.
The East-West ideological conflict, during the Cold War, aggravated the situation. Groups of young Muslim men migrated to the land of jihad — Afghanistan — to defeat the infidels, not without help from local agencies, and other international agencies in the West, especially in the US. All this is well documented; there are a number of books, describing this affair. Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton had testified in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee, accepting responsibility publicly for the recruitment, training and funding of those young men to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s against Soviet occupation. Young men used to travel to the US for studies, but fell into the hands of agents living in a very closed society, mainly Muslim Arabs, who did not let them mix with their American neighbours. They convinced them later to join the jihad. From those groups, Al Qaida, and other groups have sprung out. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria today, is one outcome of such indoctrination.
We have to bear in mind that these young men, through school and university curriculums, and other means of direct and indirect education, are fed these doctrines out of context. The aim is to make them blindly obedient. What we are hearing from Egyptian leaders is quite timely. If Egypt, because of its experience of one year of Muslim Brotherhood rule, can start the reforms badly needed in the sphere of teaching and understanding the true values of Islam, the other Arab countries could follow as well. But this is easier said than done. One Arab writer noted that if we want to look at a better future, we have to correct the past. This is the real task for the Arabs today — to “correct the past”, as most of us are looking to the past instead of looking to the future. Reforming religious discourse will take years to achieve, but thank God, we now have people in authority who recognise the need to do so. They are courageous and need to be commended. This is a sensitive issue and there is a big segment of society that is ignorant enough not to recognise the importance of reform. They are under the influence of negative ideas they are spreading, with no sense of responsibility. Their actions harm our great religion and show Muslims as being aggressive and hostile towards others.
The call coming from Egypt needs to be heard far and beyond. Leaders in education and media need to take this call seriously. Al Sissi ended his acceptance speech last week by quoting a great Arab and Muslim thinker, Mohammad Abdu, who had once said: “I have witnessed in the West, Islam with no Muslims, and in the East, Muslims with no Islam.” This had been forgotten for many decades. It is time to think about it again.
Mohammed Alrumaihi is a professor of political sociology at Kuwait University. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@rumaihi42
