Arab reform: will it ever be possible? (updated)

< —update—>
Read this Stop Ter­ror Sheikhs, Mus­lim Aca­d­e­mics Demand.

Last death fatwa issued on Arab writer Tunisian ori­gin Al-Akdhar, this is what Al-Afif Al-Akdhar wrote “The Arab Obses­sion with Vengeance”

< —End update—->

In a pre­vi­ous post I said that the con­flict in Iraq is not between Shiia and Sunni as many peo­ple insisted but it’s a con­flict between Shiia cler­ics and Sunni cler­ics, Iraq is just an exam­ple on how religion/ reli­gious leaders/Imams/ cler­ics are mov­ing the masses in Arabic/ Islamic world.

On the com­ment sec­tion of the post, DaKruser said

I have to admit that sounds strange to Amer­i­cans, Lady­Bird.
In our soci­ety, Reli­gion is SUCH a per­sonal thing that “Reli­gious” lead­ers only rep­re­sent a very small minor­ity of those that fol­low them. Quite often the Pas­tor (cleric) of a con­gre­ga­tion of a church will make state­ments that are LOUDLY dis­agreed with by his/her con­gre­ga­tion. Many make a large argu­ment that the “Right=wing Fun­da­men­tal­ists” have usurped the Admin­is­tra­tion of the US. That is hog­wash. Even if a small few reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists DO come to power, if they try too hard to impose their ideas, they get nowhere. Instead of a clan or tribal, or reli­gious struc­ture, we choose peo­ple who exem­plify one we would like to be. (Truth be told, there are sel­dom indi­vid­u­als that COMPLETELY exem­plify those val­ues, because they are politi­cians, so we just do the best we can.)

I agree with DaKruser but as we all know, it wasn’t like this all the time in the west­ern soci­ety, start­ing from the Mid­dle Ages until the begin­ning of 20th cen­tury west­ern­ers were oppressed by their cler­ics (Priests, Pas­tors) and reli­gious lead­ers con­trolled the way peo­ple thinks (explain the cru­sad­ing cam­paigns!!) as much as Muslims/ Arabs are oppressed today by their reli­gious lead­ers but for some reason(s) the sit­u­a­tion was changed in the west, reli­gious lead­ers don’t have the same influ­ence on west­ern soci­ety as they had before.

West­ern­ers owe their democ­racy and free­dom to their Free-Thinkers and philoso­phers who chal­lenged the church power and start­ing to cre­ate the split between church vs the state and later reli­gion vs life affaires.

Peo­ple like Bach with his rev­o­lu­tion­ary suc­cess­ful attempt to trans­late the church mass into Ger­man, through his music made it avail­able for every non-Latin speak­ing per­son to under­stand what exactly the Bible says.

Spin­oza chal­lenged God exis­tence and refers the exis­tence of things to nature mech­a­nism and for sure many others.

In many west­ern coun­tries kings and emper­ors played a big role and helped philoso­phers and free-thinkers directly or indi­rectly in their chal­lenge against the church for one rea­son because they were also inter­ested in lim­it­ing the power of the church in the state (Ger­many, England!!).

Now, here comes the big ques­tion “why this chal­lenge never hap­pened in Arab/ Mus­lim world?”

The chal­lenge is there, Arab Free-Thinkers and intel­lec­tu­als chal­lenged the mosque author­ity and proved that they can fight head to head against reli­gious lead­ers from the beginning,

Abu-al-ala’a Al-Ma’ari (973‑1057) is a good exam­ple:

Taha Hus­sein, uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor and writer, Taha Hus­sein spe­cial­ized in pre-Islamic lit­er­a­ture, in his book “pre-Islamic poetry” insisted that many of the Quranic-mythologies can be traced back to the pre-Islam poetry, Dr. Hus­sein is con­sid­ered to be the first who asked “why The Quran and Mohammed are unquestionable?”.

Dr Nawal Sadawi in her late book argued that Mus­lims kiss­ing of the black stone in the period of Haj in Mecca is a pre-Islam pagan rit­ual, Dr. Sadawi fled the coun­try after many threats and harass­ments by cler­ics and the government.

Just recently when a Bahraini Mus­lim woman led Mus­lims in gath­er­ing prayer in a mosque, I was fol­low­ing a debate on the inter­net, three cler­ics in one side and Dr. Ahmed Man­sour on the other side, the three cler­ics put their case as it’s heresy that women lead Mus­lims in prayer, Dr Man­sour a PhD in Islamic stud­ies who lives in exile after harass­ments by his own gov­ern­ment and reli­gious lead­ers, accused the cler­ics on mix­ing tra­di­tions with reli­gion, he chal­lenged the cler­ics to pro­vide a sin­gle evi­dence on their argu­ment and they failed to do so.

So, after all why Arab thinkers and intel­lec­tu­als didn’t suc­ceeded in chang­ing the Arab/ Mus­lim soci­ety and failed to cre­ate the sep­a­ra­tion between state and reli­gion, social affaires and reli­gion and strip down reli­gious lead­ers from their power as their col­leagues in the west.

In fact the answer is very sim­ple and you can see it until today, Arab/ Mus­lim pres­i­dents and kings joined the cler­ics in their cam­paign against Arab free-thinkers to oppress them, many of the names above and oth­ers been tor­tured, impris­oned, killed or forced to go to exile by their own gov­ern­ments which by the way claim to be a sec­u­lar governments.

The rea­son is Arab/ Mus­lim gov­ern­ments knew that cler­ics are the engine which runs the masses and con­trol­ling the way peo­ple thinks, to be in their side is a guar­an­tee directly or indi­rectly that the regime will stay at the head of the state and sur­vive as long as possible.

That will explain why Al-Qardawi as the head cleric in Qatar when declared a Fatwa on jihad in Iraq a year ago still hold­ing the same posi­tion in Qatar as the grand mufti.

In Jor­dan is the same thing and in every Arab/ Mus­lim state is the same story only names and faces are changing.

I hope this will answers many ques­tions and I hope it’s very clear to peo­ple why I am very pes­simistic that Arab reform will ever be realistic.