Arabs…
Writing by abuhatem on Tuesday, 16 of October , 2007 at 8:19 am
“The man is not he who says ‘My father!’ ‘My father!’
Indeed the man is he who is himself great”
Or so the classical Arabic proverb goes. Being with the Arab and Muslim communities both at home and abroad, I find it is unfortunate that we live up to the standards of our forefathers. As Arabs, we seem to only be successful at speaking of the greatness of our forefathers. “We were,” “we were,” is what we hear constantly. We blame everyone else for our problems. It is always Israel’s fault, it is always America’s fault. “The news media is biased against us!” “The Jewish lobby!” etc. etc.
Did we ever stop to truly think and be critical of ourselves? We blame the West, yet we come to the West and live in it. We speak of the West’s injustice and decadence yet it is only in this great country that we experience the freedoms that are denied to us in our own lands. It is only in this country that we have rights, and liberties. It is only in this country where we enjoy economic freedom and prosperity.
Arabs are unsophisticated people who take everything personally. I say this as an Arab. Instead of blaming “MSNBC News,” for their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis - we should blame our own selves. Maybe the West got some things right? Obviously we as Arabs, al-Hamdulilah, have our virtues - such as strong family ties, secure neighborhoods, morals and values, etc. But even those are being taken away. We seem to copy the West in everything bad and then oppose the West in everything good.
It reminds me of one of my favorite poets, Nizar Qabbani, who highly critical of Arab nationalism spoken in unforgiving terms of our horrid socio-economic-political condition. One especially poignant picture of this was his poem written after Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war:
We have lost the war
It is not a surprise
Because we have entered it
With everything Middle Eastern of rhetoric and speeches
Those stories we quote of ‘Antar which did not kill a fly
You do not win a war
With a reed and a flute
Qabbani would later write another scathing line about our own condition:
Our days revolve
Around backgammon, chess, and sleeping
And you call yourselves, “The best nation which ever came to mankind.”
We must live up to what Allah has told us in the Qur’an. We are the best nation which ever came to mankind, but we are hardly acting in such a way. The Muslim world fortunately, with its Islam, has surpassed the West in morals and societal values - but our socio-economic-political downfall is because of our laziness and blame of others. We are uncritical of ourselves.
Qabbani wrote a poem that said that when they announced the death of the Arabs there would be none to grieve over them. We deserve everything we are getting - it is all from our own hands. Actually Allah is being merciful to us because we deserve much worse.
As much as we remember our good points, we must remember our bad ones. Deep down inside I believe that we are jealous of the freedom and democracy of the West. And so to justify it - we attack the West and claim that “It was our idea!” or “The Classical Arabs lived better lives.” We are ethnocentric. We believe that we are the best people. If any other civilization or culture thinks up better ideas - we are jealous of them and attack them. We are unsophisticated people. Unsophisticated people.
Instead of looking back, we should look ahead - and fix ourselves. We have intellectual laziness. We believe that just by saying a few things about the Israel lobby or the “Jewish media,” that this is going to make us intellectual. Yet we do not read. The average Arab reads in one year what the average European reads in one day. We don’t write. Or when we do write it is just gossip. We have no idea, no idea… we are so behind.
As Qabbani said:
   Read a book
   Write a book!
   Nobody knows you exist in caves
   People take you for a breed of mongrels
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