The Future of the Moslem Mind, Final

by Tarek Heggy at February 10, 2004 4:12 AM

Winds of Change.NET Cairo correspondent Tarek Heggy (see his article archive, and read his book "Culture, Civilization and Humanity") is back with a new series. I have some issues with his analysis, especially when it comes to his take on American culture. Nevertheless, his articles are always thought provoking and so we're always happy to present them here.

Here's the complete series:

  1. The Big Change in Islamic Societies
  2. Muslims & The Clash of Civilizations
  3. The Mentality of Violence... and the Games Nations Play!
  4. A Movement Bred in the Isolation of the Desert
  5. The Fall of the Oppressors and the Emergence of the Sword
  6. The Crisis Facing Non-Wahabbi Islam

The Future of the Moslem Mind, Part 6:
The Crisis Facing Non-Wahabbi Islam
by Tarek Heggy

There are no permanent social phenomena; they are the result of circumstances and factors. Therefore the fear that non-Wahabbi Islam, which was the main trend among the majority of Muslims for several centuries, is being edged out of its central role is a legitimate one.

The moderate brand of Islam will not be reinstated in its former position unless the factors making up the equation of internal collapse to which Islamic societies are exposed are solved (starting with autocracy to the mentality of violence to lack of competence to declining living standards to despair to the collapse of educational systems) and unless the outside world in general and the world’s only superpower in particular realize that adopting hostile stands against Islam and Muslims indiscriminately can only provoke negative reactions. This is all the more true given that they were partners with those responsible for the downward spiral and helped bring about the series of external factors that allowed the cycle of violence to attain its present level.

Humanity’s failure to support and reinforce the gentle, non-militant brand of Islam to which most Islamic societies until recently belonged by helping remove the internal and external ‘landmines’ which eroded the ability of those societies to stand up to the assault of militant Islam is a crime committed by humanity against itself, a crime for which we shall all pay an exorbitant price.

I fear that the primary cause of this is the ‘infantile culture’ of the world’s foremost superpower. The United States, despite its great achievements in tens of fields suffers from what I call in my lectures the “cultural infantilism of American policies”. If we liken humanity to a body, the spinal cord of that body would be culture, a rare commodity among most citizens of the United States and a large portion of its intellectuals. The only explanation for this is the gap between material/scientific/technological advances and ‘cultural richness’, and the confusion in all intellectual and cultural centres in the United States between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’. Perhaps a comparison between “A Study of History” by Arnold Toynbee and the writings of most of the famous American writers on politics and the struggle of civilizations would clarify the point I am trying to make.

Islamic Societies and Problems with the Meaning of ‘Progress’ and ‘Modernity’.

A combination of closed autocratic regimes, outdated educational systems, state-controlled media, and a rigid, often extremist, understanding of religion renders many Muslims and Arabs wary of notions like ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’. The internal factors I have mentioned coupled with a number of external factors, such as the infantile culture in some highly developed nations, have led the Muslim Arab mind to think that the call for progress and modernity is a call for dependence and the loss of cultural specificity.

What exacerbates the situation is that many Arabs and Muslims feel that the values of Western civilization are for westerners only, not for everyone. I have exerted tremendous efforts to make it clear to my readers in Egypt and the Middle East that modernization is a human phenomenon first and foremost. The prescription for progress has no nationality or religion, as borne out by the different cultural backgrounds of such developed societies as the United States, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea. I devoted one of my books, “The Values of Progress”, to demonstrating to the young people in my society the fallacy of the argument that progress and modernization will result in the loss of our identity and cultural specificity.

As a man who has applied modern management techniques on a large scale, I know that there is ‘successful management’ and ‘unsuccessful management’, but I have no knowledge of Arab, Chinese, African, or French management. Japan developed in leaps and bounds over the last fifty years, but Japanese society, especially outside the capital, is still quintessentially Japanese. Whoever denies that progress is a purely human phenomenon and that the process leading to it is also human has obviously never seen the mechanics of progress at first hand - which may be the reason most academics are not interested in the issue.

Oppressive regimes are matched by the local citizen who lacks any connection with the outside world and who thinks that modernity is the other side of the coin of dependence. He would not believe that democracy is a human product, and a human right and not a Western commodity for westerners, nor realize that the maxim that “for each society, there is the brand of democracy that suits it” is misleading. For while it is true that there are many forms of democracy, it is equally true that they all contain mechanisms of accountability designed to bring rulers down from the realm of masters to that of servants of society.

The question over the future of the Muslim mind is the same as the question over the future of Islamic societies: is it a future of freedom, democracy, prosperity and progress, or the opposite?

The answer to this question will determine the answer to the question about the future of the Muslim mind: will it follow the route of moderate Islam or that of Wahabbi Islam?

For more of Tarek Heggy's writtings in English, please visit www.t-heggy-site-contents.org and for Tarek Heggy's writings in French please visit www.metransparent.com/authors/french/tarek_heggy.htm.

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