George’s ShockBlog

What a Surprise ! The Arabs are Learning to Discuss Among  Themselves !

Most of the world banned public discussion centuries ago. Dictators and warlords trade in secrecy. The joke ‘Minister for Information’ in Tunisia, before the Arab spring swept him from power, believed that his job was to censor the media ruthlessly, so that news of the outside world did not reach his people. It would only upset them to know just how prosperous the world is becoming, particularly countries of the Far East, and parts of Africa; places which the Arabs have felt to be inferior.

 The Arab 22 nations of the Middle East and north Africa,  amounting to about four hundred million people, are only a small part of Islam in the world. And the Arab world has been the most secretive, and the most deliberately backward,  refusing to translate Western books on science and politics into Arabic, to keep their people ‘pure’ from civilising public discourse. The problems is simple, even the most sketchy of scientific knowledge seems to undermine The Koran; not only in direct refutation of Koranic claims, but also in wider knowledge such as the contradictory evidence to the holy texts from geology, genetics, biology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, palaeontology, history, physics and the study of ancient texts, which reveals many of them to be bogus.

And so the Muslim world has had to shut down almost all scientific knowledge, save that of pharmacy (but NOT medicine since so many people rely upon Western cures to stay alive, but do not want to inquire into anything that suggests Evolution!) A decade ago the Saudis promised to build advanced medical facilities and to enter the world’s economy in medicine, but, inevitably, the contradictions of all science with holy books threw power back into the hands of raving pulpit preachers who had the plan shelved. And those same preachers raging against women and The West each day have drawn Saudi Arabia closer and closer to their hoped-for paradise on earth set somewhere in the seventh century. And in keeping with the protection of seventh century knowledge, even public discussion on many subjects is banned. The Saudis now call it ‘terrorism’. The Shia cleric Nimr Al-Nimr, murdered on January 2^nd 2015, was a somewhat moderate voice calling for quite mild reforms, but that was enough for the Saudis to call him a terrorist. As one Arab intellectual recently avowed, it has become illegal for Arabs to have opinions, or to share ideas.

In Pakistan (which is not an Arab country) the former dictator, Zia-U-Haq, forbad all Western scientific journals and books, and so a university scientific education ended with those piles of old and mouldy Western journals of the nineteen eighties. Universities were turned into mosques. A science course spent much time discussing the speed which Paradise is drawing away from earth, which was the supposed centre of the universe, or the temperatures of the fires of hell. There has been some respite upon their war against science, but it has resolved into a terrible dichotomy in the minds of science students where speculation upon the nature of the universe has to be curtailed.

A new kind of free discussion is beginning to appear on Egyptian and Middle Eastern television, in which a prominent writer or academic may be brave enough to spell-out the failures of the Muslim world compared to The West. Those speakers have to be careful of course, and have to pretend that the Islamic world is far ahead, and that The West will, one day, bow to the superior Islamic cultures… only… Only the reality is becoming intrusive. And the reality is that the Muslim world is rapidly being overtaken by countries like China, India, Brazil and Nigeria, once regarded as culturally very inferior. One such speaker is the outspoken Ibrahim Al-Buleihi, former member of the Saudi Shura ruling council, who has been courageous in setting the record straight in such things as Arab aggression, and Arab backwardness.

What has been revealed is the depth of delusion the Arabic world carries. And how they believe that the greater world could be vastly improved by a dose of the Koran in Arabic, and some Sharia Law. Underpinning their sense of superiority is a constant reference to the Great Humiliations of the past, by which they may mean the partitioning of the Arab world into countries such as Iraq and Syria after the Great War and upon the decline of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. It was the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, cooked-up by Britain and France upon dividing the Middle East under spheres of Allied interest. That agreement imposed rectilinear nations out of the hodgepodge of tribal allegiances is spoken sorely by Arab intellectuals as if it happened yesterday. Raving preachers in mosques play upon the Great Humiliation, describing, for example, how Westerners belittle the Islamic nation of Turkey, by naming a bird, and eating it on the holy day of Christmas. We know of no such humiliation. In fact, many British and French have an admiration for the Arab peoples for their socially advanced forms of relationships; although women are excluded from that.

Because they have no notion of cultural pluralism, lifestyle, and the public good, the Arabs have long assumed that the wealth, bought by oil, positions The West as mere servants of the Islamic world, providing them with cars and phones as any good servant should. But the hard realisation is that the Arab world produces almost nothing, not even needles and head-dresses. ‘Your headband was made in England!’ scorned one modern Arab thinker to his television host. But to be fair there are a few successes such as in telecommunications (safe from Koranic insult) like Orascom in Egypt and Etilsalat in Abu Dhabi (UAE)

One Arab intellectual teasingly proposed that almost every Arab believes that the Arab world could walk on the moon next year if they had an inclination. ‘They see American passenger planes with the names of Arab countries and assume that we made them! They use mobile phones with Arab writing and assume that they were made by Arabs!’ he scorned. The depth of Arab delusion concerning their abilities is worrying, and so are their poorly realised plans to modernise. But modernise they must. The falls in oil prices is beginning to squeeze them. Most Arab countries import not only most of their food, but also all home-contents even down to knives and forks. And they have little sense of the enormous social changes required to begin to make such things, including building a universal technical and vocational education. They have no idea of automated factories, but still think in terms of an artisan in the souk cutting-out spoons with hand-shears. Interestingly, that’s exactly how china saw mass production fifty years ago. Small-scale makes big economy? No, it doesn’t!

It is all a matter of understanding economics. They look to Japan, China, Korea and even Israel, and complain that many nations took Western technology fifty years ago and now profit by it, while the Arab world merely offers the disaffected youth the promises of seventy black-eyed virgins when they kill themselves. And it is the lesson of economic reality that hurts the most. As one writer pointed-out, the four hundred million Arabs (including all that oil) has a smaller GDP than that Germany, and is likely to fall with the falling price of oil. Even with the oil, the Arab nations together produce about the same as one State of the USA.

The Killer Figures – From IMF Country Report on Saudi Arabia September 2015

Saudi Arabia Corporate Sector

Although the Non-Oil Private Sector of the Saudi Economy may be larger than the Corporate Sector (there is little information) these figures illustrate a very weak and almost insignificant part of the Saudi Economy, outside subsidiary Oil businesses.

The total Saudi GDP is set at 644 -744 billions of US Dollars. Of that, the Corporate world makes a mere 27 billion, and the private sector, as much. It is all a bit of a guess. But it does illustrate the urgency of reform and the small base upon which an economy may be built.

The pretence that Arab nations could rapidly become rich by means other than oil is a serious one. One writer mentioned the unbelievable, that any commercial future of the Arab nations must necessarily involve the liberation of women. Arab intellectuals talk of major social reform to come such as the release of women from bondage and into the workforce; the learning of  English, the  abandonment of world-shaming executions, the modernising of universities with a Western slant towards technology,  and most controversially of all, -the introduction of democracy. In The West, people vote and a few weeks later the government changes with not a blip. Why do Arab changes of government always involve car-bombs and guns, they ask?

News of the Western ‘work-ethic’ comes hard. But where could they possibly introduce the idea of work into nations dependent upon oil revenues? A recent survey, says one Arab politician, revealed that the average Arab administrator does twenty seven minutes of work a day, and spends his time drinking coffee, chatting or running errands. But in The West, people work 40, 50, sometimes 60 hours a week.

And so the common features of the West such as Free Speech, Human Rights, and Democracy is beginning to weigh heavily on Arab minds.

Behind all the grumbling and the calls for reform lies one unmentionable obstacle. For Arab nations to commercialise and industrialise they would need an educated workforce, familiar with Western science and technology. But that same Western knowledge is incompatible with the Koran, which is profoundly anti-science and demands that all  knowledge comes from authority, and not from the laboratory. Until the Arab nations are able to remove Islam from college and from daily life and consign it so the mosque, then there is no possibility of an Arab renaissance. And the many uneducated raving mullahs shouting from their pulpits are not going to relinquish power that easily, even as Arab fortunes sink into the sands.  

Clips of Arab intellectuals appraising Arab failures and achievements may be seen on YouTube, under Memri TV.