Justice, Peace, Integrity<br /> of Creation
Justice, Peace, Integrity<br /> of Creation
Justice, Peace, Integrity<br /> of Creation
Justice, Peace, Integrity<br /> of Creation
Justice, Peace, Integrity<br /> of Creation

Under the eye of the Prophet

25.02.2015 Le Monde, Michel Guerrin Translated by: jpic-jp.org In 2004 the Jordanian film director, Yahya Alabdallah, produced a short film entitled "Six Minutes" available on You Tube.  Students and passers-by are asked in front of a camera if they know of such and such personality, country or historical fact.  They do not.

They do not know who is Vivaldi, Freud, the Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani, Tchaikovski, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, or the Syrian poet Mohammed Al-Maghout.  They do not know where Hungary is situated nor when the French Revolution took place.  The film ends by stating:  “Outside of school, the Arab child reads about 6 minutes a year.”

Both the UNESCO statistics and those of the Arab League concur: 6 minutes for the Arab student versus 12,000 minutes for the European one. It is self-explanatory.  According to UNESCO, in 2009 illiteracy rates among Arabs over 15 years of age hovered around 40% - especially for women.  It’s worse according to Abderrahim Youssi, who teaches at the Mohamed V University in Rabat, and who wrote in Le Monde on July 21 and 22, 2012, “what’s worse is that half the Arab population is illiterate.”  Young Arabs have problems even with their language for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because there are two Arabic languages: classical Arabic reserved for the elite and spoken popular Arabic.  Mohamed Charfi, former minister for education in Tunisia, declared to Le Monde in 1998: “I don’t think that, for any length of time, a people can write a language that they do not speak, nor can they speak a language that they do not write.”  And yet this phenomenon is increasing because of religion; the imams use the classical Arabic which is bound to the Koran.  As a result of this, says Abderrahim Youssi, “how many potential scientists, poets and writers or even educated citizens find themselves right from the day they were born in the situation of being mentally damaged for life?”  Damaged and indoctrinated, for education and teaching go hand in hand with religion.  This is nothing new.  But it’s becoming more widespread, explained Mohamed Métalsi, director for cultural initiatives at the Arab World Institute in Paris (IMA):  “For example, for the children, education is heavily religious.  For the grownups, the teaching of philosophy is based on Islamic texts.  Thus exit Greece or the Enlightenment.”

Moulim El Aroussi, head of the exhibition ‘Contemporary Morocco’, agrees.  “What is new is the ‘preaching’ during classes, from primary to secondary levels, where even a math teacher seems to find a way to bring religion into the subject.”  Mohamed Charfi wanted “a divorce between language and the Koran,” but the opposite is taking place.  In the Arab world, all the complex interactions of everyday life are impregnated with religion.  And each one is under the eye of the Prophet.

But it is not only religion which damages the culture of Arab countries, far from it.  Other hostile agents do it too, such as dictatorship, poverty and corruption.  As a result, over decades, not one single Arab State has put in place a cultural policy other than that which aims at controlling its creators.  The only projects with any daring or ambition are coming from the oil kingdoms as well as from Qatar - dictatorships that search notoriety by adopting worldwide standards.

Let’s take an example. According to the United Nations “Arab report on human development of 2002,” fewer books were published in one year in all Arab countries combined (380 million people) than in Spain (with 47 million).  And that wasn’t by design. This part of the world is lagging behind the rest, except for the publication of religious books which accounts for 17% of production against a world average of 5%.  According to Moulim El Aroussi “in every book fair in the Arab world the same problem crops up regarding Islamic books;  they are not expensive, they are well printed and occasionally they are given away free rather than be sold.”

The same goes for book translations:  according to a United Nations report of 2003, the Arab world will only have translated a mere 10,000 books in [a] thousand years - the same number Spain does in one year.  This conclusion is contested.  But Mohamed Métalsi confirms the trend:  “the great works of the West are seldom translated, and those that are, are of a poor standard.”   The important Arab universities also lose out. “It is evident in the social sciences, a field in which the researcher reflects upon the society, thus creating problems for the state in the face of an aggressive Islamization,” explains Mohamed Métalsi.  Moulin El Arroussi agrees:  “There are fewer and fewer serious researchers who understand the difference between faith and science.”  Another sign:  the hundreds of harassments, censorships, act of vandalism and imprisonment that creative minds suffer.  And Moulim El Aroussi adds that this happens now as it was happening before the “Arab Spring” and in all countries.

The most recent case is the film Exodus by Ridley Scott, which in December 2014 was censored: in Morocco on the grounds that God was made visible; in Egypt because Jews are shown as the builders of the pyramids; in the Gulf States because the film contains “religious errors.”  Some Arab countries come out of it better than others and some great works do make it here and there. But they are shooting stars in an area of the world that is sliding into obscurity, says Mahomed Métalsi.  So as pointed out by the writer Zenofer Senocak in an article which appeared in Le Monde on January 20:  “the terrorists are recruiting from a community which is increasing in number, made up of masses of uneducated Muslims.” One wonders if Mohamed Métalsi is making a connection between this impoverishment of culture in Arab countries and the recent demonstrations against Charlie Hebdo.  “Of course! This inability to see from a distance, to judge by oneself, the fact of seeing images without being able to read what they say, leads to that.”

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