ARAB INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTS OF GLOBALIZATION

By Georges Tarabichi

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CHAPTERS:

GLOBALIZATION AS A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE

GLOBALIZATION OF THE WORLD

INTELLECTUALS AS HEIRS TO RELIGIOUS SCHOLARS

BETWEEN CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND APOCALYPTICAL VIEWS

FROM REJECTING GLOBALIZATION TO REJECTING MODERNITY

THE TOOL WITHOUT THE SPIRIT

QUESTIONING THE READINESS OF ARAB CULTURE

GLOBALIZING THE ARAB WORLD

NOTES

 GLOBALIZATION AS A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE

When Muslim religious scholars identified a certain issue as controversial, they meant that controversy was permissible and jurisprudence was required; such debate and legal deliberations, no matter how different the views may have been, did not lead to accusations of heresy or apostasy. In this particular sense, I call globalization a controversial issue.

Globalization can be subject to a give-and-take analysis, accepted or rejected or ignored, viewed positively or negatively, resulting in denunciation or a label of heresy. But more importantly, a positive or a negative position towards globalization does not even determine the ideological identity of its supporters or attackers. Someone who is pro-globalization is not necessarily liberal, and someone who is anti- globalization is not necessarily conservative.

It is not rare that we meet among globalization’s critics and those concerned by it – of which there are many – nationalists, Marxists or fundamentalists. Moreover, it is not even that rare to find adversaries of the globalization game or people who are scared by it or wary of it among its leading players. Indeed, Patrick Buchanan – known as a leader within the US Republican Party until his recent withdrawal – recently published a book entitled A Republic, Not an Empire, supporting isolationism – a reoccurring theme in American political history – and warning against the growing influence of multinational corporations, which, he believes, are the driving, if not the only, force of globalization. Buchanan denounced the MNC’s hegemony over the United States for their ability to undermine the credibility of the US electoral system (by controlling the keys to the Republican and Democratic parties), tending – due to their multinational identity – to be independent of US national interests, and strengthening this independence through a new world order. [1]

Another example of globalization as a controversial problematic comes from French literature on the subject, which expanded heavily towards the end of the 20th century. To avoid the details, let us look into book titles that are indicative by themselves. If Viviane Forrester held globalization responsible for all the contemporary injustices in her L’ horreur économique, [2] Alain Minc’s covert response to her came in his La mondialisation heureuse. [3] And if Philippe Moreau Defarges believed globalization’s good news in his La mondialisation, vers la fin des frontières, [4] Serge Latouche interpreted globalization as little more than a new approach to a campaign of L’ occidentalisation du monde [5] and wrote the most scathing defamation of it under the title Les dangers d’une économie planétaire. [6]

Furthermore, the controversial problematic was no longer restricted to the economic field. During a seminar, sensationally titled: “La mondialisation: a-t-elle une âme?” and including 30 businessmen, economists and theologists (representing the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian and Hindu faiths and Free-Masonry and African animism), the attendees disagreed on the spiritual value of globalization. They further debated the possibility it offers for the development of a new global spirituality, and differed on the ability of the new world economic order to produce a new world ethical order. [7]

GLOBALIZATION OF THE WORLD

Obviously, such a controversial interpretation of globalization comes from the novelty of the phenomenon and the concept’s fluidity and association with different meanings and values. Moreover, globalization’s vastness and its indicative plurality created the assumption of a spiritual duality; consequently globalization was subjected to a Manichean dual interpretation based on feelings and qualitative judgments rather than knowledge. Globalization was caught between the dichotomy of good and evil, love and hate, or right and left.

Hence, anyone who speaks about globalization is obliged first to specify what s/he means by it. To me, globalization, according to its derivative indications themselves, does not mean anything other than the world becoming one. Before economy, information and cultural industry, the world itself becomes globalized. To begin with, we should not forget that the world, in its ultimate form, is a new concept. Before the new world discoveries of America and Australia, and prior to harnessing distance by modern transport and communication development, the world was in fact a set of worlds. Frontiers between these worlds were not merely geographic; they were also linguistic, religious and ethnic. It was not rare that a sub-world imagined itself as the whole world.

This is the world that is being unified by globalization, and herein lies the dilemma: the world is not being unified except into its chronic division of a developed world and an underdeveloped world; a world of rich people and a world of poor people, a knowledge- and information-producing world and a world that does not even have the means to consume knowledge and information.

According to a famous description by the United Nations, 20% of the world’s humans own 80% of its wealth, and 80% of the world’s humans do not own more than 20% of its wealth. This puts four-fifths of humankind on one level, and the remaining fifth on another.[8] According to another report, 20% of rich people own 85% of the global product, while 20% of poor people do not own more than 1.1% of it.[9]
Contrary to a very strong belief, the world’s globalization – in terms of this chronic dichotomy – is not restricted to the economic field. Merely defining globalization as the process of internationalizing capital – the propagation of production and consumption modes worldwide, the hegemony of MNC’s on the most important economic sectors, the global victory of market economy, the extraordinary development of international exchanges and financial liquidity, etc. – strikes me as inadequate. Globalization should be understood as an all-encompassing phenomenon of cooperative mechanisms, multiple dimensions and comprehensive influence. In addition to economic globalization – no doubt, the most prominent and accepted tool of quantitative measurement – there exists technological globalization, environmental globalization, food globalization, [10] legal globalization, [11] informational globalization and, finally, cultural globalization.

INTELLECTUALS AS HEIRS TO RELIGIOUS SCHOLARS

I say “finally;” but perhaps I should have said “firstly” because of an irony special to globalization’s destiny, or, more accurately, the destiny of its reception in the Arab world. To clarify this characteristic, I again offer a similarity in Islamic scholarship. In Islamic Arab civilization, scholars were the highest superintendents of new events and the foremost recipients of emergent or incoming issues, thus analyzing, outlawing, decrying or denouncing. Intellectuals inherited this role following the nahda – the Arab intellectual awakening of the 19th century. These new scholars posed to the Arab world – as it collided with European progress and was shocked by it – the problematic of the incomer and the intruder in a way un-precedented in Islamic Arab civilization, even during the zenith of its openness to other civilizations and neighboring or inherited cultures.

“Organic” intellectuals, thanks to novel historical circumstances, replaced “traditional” intellectuals; scholars, as both bearers and implementers of the nation’s awareness, are now the callers for jurisdiction, not in terms of religious permission and forbiddance, but in terms of acceptance or rejection as determined in cultural anthropology.

Without daring further into the details of this point, I must point out that globalization entered the Arab world not through the phenomena itself, but primarily through its concept. Globalization did not manifest itself in the Arab world’s stock exchanges, in open markets (let alone the closed ones), in the portfolios of shareholding companies (let alone its companies owned by families or individuals) or in delocalized factories. [12] Rather, globalization was first witnessed in the brains of its intellectuals – whether they were specialized in economics, law, sociology, history, anthropology and linguistics or those "general"  intellectuals [12a] in charge  – in their mind – of public conscience.

The concept of globalization in circulation in the Arab world is primarily the product of intellectuals and primarily for their consumption. [13] It is, in a sense, an ink-on-paper concept more than an on- the-ground fact. As such, it seems more controllable than the phenomenon it supposedly refers to. In fact, due to the chronic divorce between thought and fact in the Arab world – present since it was breached by the “incoming,” “invading” or “imported” Western modernity (there is no dearth of adjectives) – much of the function of intellectuals since the nahda was to control the discourse rather than the reality, concepts rather than facts, and, consequently, to control the minds more than the tangibles (using traditional terms here).

The current debate on a purely mental level concerning globalization between the large segments of the Arab intelligentsia is almost entirely a renewed manifestation of a structural constant in the thinking mechanism of this intelligentsia.

Most of what is being said today about globalization comes close to a repetition of what was said earlier about “cultural invasion,” “imperialism,” “subordination” or even about “modernity” as an “alien” or “invading” concept. The scholarship of modern intellectuals, compared to that of older ones, is concerned not with following up events on the ground, but with chasing concepts in the space of theoretical abstraction. And if the concept of globalization itself is not yet complete in terms of indicative maturity and precision, this provides merely an additional incentive to intensify the purely academic disputes around it.

Since these academic disputes do not lead to any matching material fact, they can exacerbate and simmer without any restraint. This explains the phenomenon of ideological inflation witnessed by Arab intellectuals around the concept of globalization. Never before were articles written, seminars held, books penned and studies translated in such concentration as with globalization in Arab culture in the last years of the 20th century.[14]

For example, Arab cultural magazines dedicated dossiers, themes and whole issues to the globalization issue with an accelerating pace during the second half of the 1990s. They include Lebanon’s Al- Tariq (“What is globalization?” – the third such theme by the magazine in the last two years), Tunisia’s Al-Wifaq Al-Arabi (“Globalization: What is left for the Arabs”), Egypt’s Qadaya Fikriya (“Arab Thought between Globalization, Modernity and Post-Modernity”), Egypt’s Sutur (“Globalization, the Arab world and the Future”) and Kuwait’s Alam al-Fikr in its last issue in 1999 (“Globalization, the Phenomenon of Current times”). It is also noteworthy that every week for the last four months, Egypt’s Al-Ahram daily has dedicated a whole page for the debate on globalization under the theme “We and the Phenomenon of Globalization”; thus far it has published 13 parts written by some 40 authors and researchers.

Clearly, this ideological inflation cannot be justified by just one factor. Undoubtedly the debate on globalization gave crisis-stricken Marxist proponents a valuable opportunity to renew their efforts and to try to regain the credibility of their discourse. Something similar can be said about the declining nationalist ideology.

But in any event, if this ideological inflation was indeed unleashed, this occurred because there is no leash fastening it to the hard ground of reality. Concepts are more capable of high-flying when they are less burdened with ties to reality, similar to the spirit after it leaves the captivity of the body in traditional mythology. The omnipresence of a concept often compensates for the absence of tangible facts.

In the Arab world, a typical case of what Edward Said describes as “the transfer of theories,” [15] has charged globalization a priori with an enormous imaginative power; the concept of globalization was introduced through enculturation, separating it from the material context of its display in Western reality and thought. Moreover, the historical impasse in which  most Arab societies are stuck afflicted the concept of globalization with a largely negative connotation. The incoming, or introduced, novelty tends in this case to be rooted in apprehensive soil. Contrary to Marx’s image of the angst-ridden proletariat who has nothing to lose in a revolution other than his shackles, the Arab intellectual tends to greet globalization – this sweeping, violating concept – with fear and enmity, fearing it may steal from him existence itself.

He who suffers suffocation for lack of oxygen prefers not to make any new move, maximizing his chance of survival. In the case of a historical impasse, any change threatens to be worse and engenders the pessimistic possibility of complete annihilation more than it creates an optimistic hope of reaching the end of the tunnel. This fear – which I do not hesitate to call neurotic– works alongside the mechanism of controlling the concept more than the reality of the concept, making the position of Arab intellectuals vis-à-vis globalization characterized as superstitious. It evades discussing globalization as a historical inevitability – or at least an objective process triggered by the entrance of capitalism, or as a dominant world order in a new stage of its development – and seems, to a dominant segment of the Arab intelligentsia, to be only an evil spirit needing to be exorcised.
If I seem harsh on Arab intellectuals – by the way, I am one of them – it is because the standpoint of most of them on globalization seems closer to that of an exorcist who curses the subject’s name to eschew the evil of the subject itself and paralyze its efficiency.

The strategy applied by Arab intellectuals in the so-called resistance to globalization can be described as a nominal strategy and is reminiscent of Hegel’s observation that the concept of a dog cannot bite. However, although this strategy may be sterile by itself and cannot play any role in the real resistance to globalization, it can still negatively effect how the relationship between the Arabs and the present-day is structured, especially in terms of public awareness.

Compared to Japan, East Asian nations and even Turkey and China today, the Arabs seem to be a nation who mistook their entry into the modern age. Doubtless, many historical and objective factors played a role in complicating the relationship between the Arabs and the current times, including the similarity of modernity and imperialism, the implantation of the state of Israel, and finally the Gulf War. But the ideological dust that many Arab pens stir up about the incoming globalization is, this time, only striking a subjective posture that is doomed to repeat the Arab’s misunderstandings with the modern age.

Making things worse, this ideological mobilization against globalization – the indicative phenomenon of the modern age [16] – is accompanied by and synchronized to a very strong ideological campaign to depart from the modern age itself in the name of Islamic fundamentalism.

BETWEEN CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND APOCALYPTICAL VIEWS

Ronald Robertson concludes his famous book on globalization by pointing out that it is the way we think about globalization which is decisive.[17] This statement probably applies to the Arab scenario more than any other case. Globalization in the Arab world is nothing more than the manner of its speculation. And since I am talking about globalization’s repercussions on the Arab culture, let me say that the most effective of these repercussions, at least at this time span, is how globalization– as always I am referring to the concept – is being received.

In fact, an examination of the literature on globalization which dominates Arab cultural space shows that the dominant logic in dealing with globalization is – as is the case with neurotic ideologies – the logic of conspiracy theories. This is hardly strange. Conspiracy logic is the preferred mechanism to defend a wounded self, one that is schizophrenically incapable of acting in reality.

At this point, I should point out that the dissemination of this almost universal Arab conception of globalization was encouraged by various pieces of international literature that conceptualized “globalization as a trap” – this title of the famous book by German journalists Hans-Peter Martin and Harald Schumann carries an even more sensational subtitle: “An attack on democracy and prosperity.” [18] This book was translated into Arabic as part of an extensive series in the Arab world by the Kuwaiti Alam al-Maarifa. Also, summaries and positive reviews of the book were published in dozens of daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines, and televised debates and even university seminars were held. [19] Generally speaking, articles by Arab researchers reference the book’s arguments, although they are not based on research and are, in fact, much closer to denunciation and journalistic sensationalism.

And while its true that some Arab writers avoid using the term “conspiracy”, since the flaws of this concept have been exposed to some extend in the Arab cultural discourse, yet, the logic of conspiracy theories, while not necessarily explicit, is easily deducible from the pairing, prevalent in Arab discourse, between globalization and imperialism in general, and US-imperialism in particular.
Among Arab writers who avoid the term conspiracy, but still blemish globalization with such implications, is Morocco’s Abdel-Ilah Balqaziz, who defines globalization as: “An act of cultural rape and symbolic aggression on other cultures, a synonym of forceful and technology-equipped penetration, thus destroying culture’s sovereignty in the societies reached by globalization.” [20]
Then there is Syria’s Mutaa Safadi, who tends to liken globalization to what he calls imperialism of the absolute. He believes that “globalization is an attenuated description of the comprehensive attack on all countries of the world [launched to subdue them] to the will of the big capitalist, who has turned from an industrial capitalist into a financial capitalist, hoarding astronomical fortunes. These fortunes can move in real time, in moments, from one place to another, destroying [national] economies in seconds and are capable of invading any society to strip it of its money before moving on to another society. They do this until the world is left with nothing more than the rule of money. Controlling this money is a small number of people who form a supra-state over the whole world. This is globalization’s system as it is coming into being. Imperialism today is not military; it is financial. It is the imperialism of the absolute in hands that consider themselves absolutely free to act as they wish with the world’s fortunes and economy.” [21]

To other Arab intellectuals, globalization is just a synonym for Americanization. Syria’s Burhan Ghalioun describes globalization as “the nom de guerre of Americanization,” [22] and Egypt’s Mohammad Audeh says it “is not globalization but Americanization,” stressing that “the real meaning of globalization is Americanization.” He continues, arguing that in the past the English spoke about “the mission of the white man, as the British Empire survived behind the mask of the white man who civilizes the world, whereas (now) globalization is the mission of the American man.” [23]
According to Egypt’s Yumna Tarif Khawli – who was introduced by the moderator of the seminar “Countering Globalization” as “an intelligent thinker in scientific philosophy,” – globalization is primarily a linguistic conspiracy. Since all Arab existence, according to her, is a linguistic presence, a conspiracy on the language of the Arabs is actually a conspiracy on the whole existence of Arabs. She says: “It is a ferocious attack by Western civilization to oppress the Arabic language. We are the only people in the world who speak the same language of our holy book. As analytical philosophy teaches us, language is not a reservoir of thinking that I fill with thoughts; language is the fabric of thinking itself. I suspect that after 100 years, there will be no Arab nation. The only means for realizing the Western dream of destroying the Arab nation is what is going on now through the destruction of the Arabic language. After 100 years, the Arabic language will suffer Latin’s fate. In fact, language is the haven, the refuge and the final life support if we are to survive.” [24]

However, the Arab intellectual who most adopted the logic of conspiracy theories, literally and conceptually, is Egypt’s Ahmad Hussein Amin. In an article titled “Conspiracy and Conspirators,” he announced in the first line that: “The rejection or negation by some of this conspiracy theory may be part of the conspiracy.” The conspiracy exists and has been ongoing since at least 1882, when Egypt fell under British occupation. In addition to the fact that conspiracy is a principle of existence (big fish eat small fish), it is the primary law that governs Arab’s relation with the West: “The West is about to eat us after we were about to eat it.”

Amin further argues that globalization is the newest and most intelligent stage of this eternal conspiracy, and it is economic in its declared teleology: “The main goal now of the justifiers of the West’s policies toward us, including big capitalists, businessmen and financiers, is to make a radical change in the class structure of the nation in a way that serves their commercial and economic interests. The means to make this change include the creation of new consumer habits and needs, increasing the base of people capable of consumption, and influencing the styles, ethics and values of individuals to make their main goal the search for money and the rapid accumulation of wealth by any means. Fulfilling the desire for consumption is their main end and their ultimate goal.” But under the surface of this economic teleology lies a deeper and more comprehensive teleology, comprising the whole Arab and Islamic existence, which seeks no less than the, “emptying Arab and Muslim peoples of their content, disarming them and undermining the foundations of their religion, heritage, language and customs without them feeling this emptying, disarming and undermining.” [25]

Morocco’s Mohammad Abed Al-Jaberi does not use the term “conspiracy,” but examines globalization as a radical negation of the whole nationalist existence, by destroying the three basic categories of this existence: the state, the nation and the homeland. He says: “Globalization is a system that supersedes  the state, the nation and the homeland. It promotes disintegration and dispersal. Globalization is derived from the word globe; in simple terms it means transferring to international institutions all the competences and the authority of the state in the economic and informational domains, then in the political and cultural domains, too. It means transferring state property to private individuals, who, in the globalization era, are not necessarily citizens of the homeland; they are (and should be) holders of nationless capital. Also, globalization has clear goals. It, together with its foster child privatization, target three entities: the state, the nation and the homeland. If we remove these three entities, what will be left?” [26] These last quotes escalate the denunciation of globalization, from the level of conspiracy to that of an apocalyptic vision – similar to the apocalyptic visions of medieval religious and messianic literature.

A writer influenced by modernism like Egypt’s I'tidal Othman does not hesitate to describe globalization as a “deadly game”, in whicht the one who is likely to face death is the human being himself.[27] To this idea of “the death of human kind” adds the Egyptian researcher Sayyed Bahrawi the concept of “the death of the intellectual” or even his “murder” under “the new world order” that does little other than spread arguments about “death:” “the death of the intellectual, the end of the state, the end of nationalisms, the death of ideology… and other finalities.” [28]

But it is the leading Egyptian writer Mahmoud Amin Al-Alim, who taught consecutive generations of Marxist and leftist writers, who finally goes all the way to an apocalyptic interpretation of globalization, calling it the end of ends. Although he himself objects to arguments about “the end” – which he believes are promoted by the age of globalization itself – such as “the end of history, the end of geography, the end of ideologies, the end of concepts, the end of socialisms, the end of philosophy, the end of culture,” he does not hesitate to describe globalization, though with melancholic sarcasm, as if it were “the final end of all ends.”

The quote deserves to be included in full: “Globalization has reached everything, obliterating, stereotyping and unifying our ideas, our sentiments, our feelings, our consciences, our values, our tastes, our inclinations, our food, our clothes, our aspirations, our joys, our tragedies, our achievements, our problems, our victories, our defeats, our words of love, our ways of dying. The world, as they say proudly, has become one global village! Thus, in the end, our lies were globalized, too; our unconsciousness was globalized and alienated us from the truth; and diseases, the sex and drug trade, environmental, natural and nuclear dangers, and all forms of usurpation, oppression, exploitation, alienation and inequalities between individuals, classes and peoples and interests were all globalized. This global village that has started to include us all, we the inhabitants of the earth, is, as I see it, in fact a unified global jungle, controlled by the animals that are the most ferocious, most violent, most greedy, most aggressive and most desiring of expansion, exploitation, growth and superiority. In the end, globalization is nothing but a unified market controlled by a small group of people who trade food, values, illusions, people’s fates, products, needs and interests, and who control their terrestrial and space borders, their ideas, feelings and dreams and their present and their future; through their scientific equipment, scientific arms, scientific armies, scientific plans and philosophies that assume the shape of scientific laws and absolute sacred norms. With these, they harness truth for the worst reason and the basest goals, they remove the borders of cultures, characteristics, nationalisms, governments and states to achieve global, even cosmic currency that legalizes their complete and comprehensive hegemony!” [29]

Faced by this apocalyptic vision – which revives the language of Jeremiah and John from biblical times and the language of Kafka and Orwell from modern times – the Tunisian sociologist Taher Labib’s analysis of the psychological condition of Arab intellectuals is completely accurate: “Arab writings make globalization a term of general catastrophe that is not free from a metaphysical extension; thus, talking about globalization is talking about death, annihilation and suicide.” [30] 

FROM REJECTING GLOBALIZATION TO REJECTING MODERNITY

The most dangerous result of this macabre response to globalization – as a phenomenon and as a concept – may be a downward spiral where the rejection of globalization turns into a rejection of modernity, and defaming globalization becomes defaming modernity. In this case, denunciations and lamentations directed against globalization cease to involve merely a controversial question prone to contradictory ideological employment by its supporters and its defamers. It becomes an expression of what I described elsewhere as a “collective Arab neurosis.” [31] It is the same neurosis that, since the shock of meeting the West, is witnessed in Arab cultural discourse; produced – and consumed – by a large sector of the Arab intelligentsia under the pathological impact of a narcissist wound which has remained open ever  since the Arab “self” belatedly discovered itself in the mirror of the developed West.

Arab discourse – or some of its architects – who are ailing from the West, or to be precise, by the West’s development, uses globalization as a pretext to renew the defamation of modernity, critiquing modernity as a solely Western development, thus cultivating what some call “the culture of hatred” [32] or “the culture of detestation,” as I prefer to call it. [33]

This response to globalization as a new version of the “detested” Western modernity expresses itself most in the works of Arab intellectuals with Islamist tendencies, be them “traditional” or “organic” – according to Gramsci’s famous classification. [34]

The standpoint of traditional Islamist intellectuals towards globalization is demonstrated by a quote from Saudi Arabia’s Saud Funaysan, who labels globalization as, “a new Western heresy that limits the entity of the Arab nation, weakens its soul, sucks it material wealth and breaks its social ties. It is a real fact and an unavoidable evil. Before discussing its negative repercussions, we have to warn that the precursor to globalization, that is, modernity with its intellectual and social meaning, paved the way for globalization’s appearance and dissemination. Modernity, with its comprehensive meaning, knocked on our doors, and we welcomed it, thinking naively that it was just Western technology. But it entered carrying the West’s culture of ideology and thought. It was a material ideology represented by Marxist thought, or capitalist thought, or both. It posed as literature, and our intellectuals not only received it, but were infatuated by it. Thus, they advertised it among us.” [35]

The description of globalization as heresy – as the child of the incoming Western modernity – is reminiscent of the claims made by a large percentage of Arab intellectuals, especially the “traditionalists” whose approach is similar to that of religious scholars. Thus the argument, as formed by the “organic” Islamist intellectuals, is a radical escalation of accusations, from that of heresy to the charge of expiation (in the original text: takfir: accusation of unbelief), although it is, to be fair, closer to ideological expiation than to religious expiation.

In his book Globalization, the Egyptian thinker and economist Jalal Ahmad Amin  demonstrates this view. The criminalization of globalization – the descendant – provides a retroactive basis for the criminalization of modernity – the origin. Modernity was already criminalized twice: because it was modernity and because it was Western. Now it is criminalized a third time, because it gave birth to that Frankensteinian monster called globalization.

The most characteristic aspect of Amin’s standpoint is that he rejects to stay on the ground of controversial issues, where pros and cons can be equal under what experts of scholasticism and theology used to call “equal evidence.” He adheres to the teleology expressed in his book’s introduction and which, as he puts it, does not exceed “explaining the truth of globalization and some of its dangers, how it curtails the happiness of human kind, its welfare and self-gratitude, which are derived from the respecting identity and individualism. These dangers come from the so-called information revolution, the prevalence of the consumer society’s values, and the dissemination of what can be described as the market civilization.” [36]

Furthermore, Amin, like other intellectuals with fundamentalist tendencies, denounces globalization as “a phenomenon which is not neutral among civilizations and cultures.” He also condemns it because it is the product, “of a specific culture” and “a globalization of a specific civilization,” that is, “Western culture,” and “Western civilization.” [37] The most dangerous and damaging aspect of his viewpoint – dangerous to any Arab cultural development project or program – is his denouncement of technology and scientific progress. He condemns those “amazed by Western civilization in general;” whether because of, “the unparalleled efficiency of material production,” or the, “transporting and storing information and providing it to those who want to make use of it.” [38] His censure continues to those enamored by, “what the West has achieved in political and social organization and cultural production,” or even human rights, which are nothing more than a slogan raised by, “those who are bedazzled by Western democracy and Western social relations.” [39]

Globalization’s author goes even further; under the theme “Technological progress as a tool of oppression,” where he dedicates four chapters of his book to criminalizing technology, including its old and even primordial forms. Amin offers a two-part critique, firstly, because any progress in technology, no matter how slight, involves a potential contradiction between human nature and human identity: “Where does this contradiction between technological progress and identity come from? I believe this contradiction has been latent since a human being made his first stone tools to facilitate hunting to guarantee his survival and to better fulfill himself. There has always been a danger that these tools would tyrannize him and turn into tools of oppression instead of being tools of emancipation.” His second critique begins: “Certainly, modern technology – meaning the production and consumption tools that human beings developed during the last two centuries, especially during the last half century – carried the danger of exposing human beings to oppression and threatening their identity and humanity more than any other danger that faced the human beings during their long history.” [40]
Is it an exaggeration, then,  to say that Globalization’s author calls Arabs and Muslims not just to boycott the era of globalization, but also to leave the current times altogether and maybe, if we follow his logic, go back to pre-Stone Age times? [40a]

THE TOOL WITHOUT THE SPIRIT

It would a gross mistake and my diagnosis would  be unrealistic if I were to equate the positions of the author of Globalization with those of the wider audience of Islamists. The latter discriminate between globalization’s advantages and disadvantages and know how to sort globalization’s technological achievements from its spirit and mentality. Even traditional thinkers, although they accuse Western modernity itself of heresy, do not hesitate to stress the need to “make use of the material achievements of Western civilization.” [41]

As Benjamin Barber noted – who penned what is probably the best study of the relation between fundamentalism and globalization – “the information revolution’s instrumentalities are also jihad’s favorite weapons.” [42] Jihad, a term that Barber metonymically uses to call all Islamic, Jewish, Christian and Hindu fundamentalisms, is “jihad via McWorld, rather than jihad versus McWorld.” [43] Jihad’s forces are too smart to challenge McWorld (the world of McDonald’s – Barber uses this term metonymically for globalization) with quixotic weapons dating back technologically to the same pre-modern times that these jihad forces want to go back to ideologically. Thus their pragmatic stand on globalization: they want to take its tools and discard its spirit.

Just as jihad forces knew how to make use of economic globalization to establish a compact network of financial institutions and non-usury Islamic banks, they show a similar pragmatic intuitiveness in making use of cultural globalization and the electronic revolution. Thus the ability shown by jihad forces in employing the primary technological engine of the globalization era – the Internet – for mobilization, organization and recruitment, as well as for spreading its ideas and ideologies. Experts estimate the number of Islamic websites today at around 650.

Recently, a leading writer on Islamic ideology announced in the first line of the first page of Al-Ahram al-Arabi that he himself had witnessed “the birth of a project whose owners announced jihad on the Internet.” [44] He was referring to Islam Online, a project launched officially in Qatar on October 5, 1999 by the International Committee for Introducing Islam via the Internet, which was formed at a meeting of 160 Islamic personalities “of erudition and vision” under the patronage of Sheikh Dr. Youssef Qardawi. The cleric said in a speech at the founding meeting: “This project, which we seek and which we worked towards, mobilizing people and collecting money, is, I believe, the jihad of our time. With these modern mechanisms, led by the Internet, we can reach out to people and talk to them in their various tongues all over the earth.” [45]

In the introduction of a booklet which introduced Islam Online, he reasserted the possibility of and the need for employing the tools of modernity’s technologies, but not its ideology, even in a fight against modernity. “We have used print, radio, and television. Today, there is a new medium known as the Internet. All religions have used it to call to their religions and sects. It is the duty of the Muslims to use this tool to propagate their great religion. The Islamic nation must prepare men to carry out this duty. This is what this major, global project – Islam Online – is doing. It carries the message of Islam to the world. It addresses non-Muslims to help them understand the creed, law, ethics and civilization of Islam. It addresses Muslims as well, to help them understand Islam correctly, explain the realities of this religion, answer the questions, and correct the misconceptions they picked up through a faulty inherited culture or through an invading imported culture.” [46]

Probably nothing symbolizes this combination of what had seemed irreconcilable contradictions – fundamentalism and modernity – more than the paradoxical title of an “information Islamic service online” program: “The fatwa bank.”

In fact, contrary to what one would expect, globalization’s technology does not seem the subject of resistance by Islamists, even when it touches upon the holiest of holies. Under the headline “The first electronic Koran in the world,” the Egyptian press recently reported that the company Triple Communication had placed on sale in Egypt a small and light electronic gadget that included “the entire Holy Koran with Othman calligraphy, a searchable encyclopedia of 2,250 verses and topics, a dictionary of unfamiliar terms in the Koran, a compass to determine the direction of the kiblah and six alarms for the times of prayer.” This occurred after, “Al-Azhar, in decision number 25 on May 23, 1999, sanctioned the trading of this gadget  in appreciation of its facilitating features and enhanced employment of modern technologies for the advancement of Allah’s book.” [47]

Aside from this pragmatic approach and its implicit tendency to perpetuate the ambiguity still plaguing Arab culture in its struggle with the paradox of authenticity versus modernity, the Islamist globalization discourse seems less tense in its outcome than the nationalist and Marxist discourse. The reasons may be, firstly, the inability of Islamists to reject the concept of globalization per se because a primary theoretical pillar of their discourse is the internationalization of the Islamic mission. A second reason may be because globalization, with its technological and practical characteristics, can in fact be separated from modernity and employed against modernity’s ideology.

From this perspective, which is opposed to the ideology of “Western” and “Westernizing” globalization, according to the fundamental description, the advantages and disadvantages of globalization can be balanced. It could be Satan’s weapon, but it can also be Satan’s weapon redirected against him. Thus some confusion and concern, and maybe some contradictions, arise in the globalization discourse of some Islamists.

The following incident may be very indicative from this perspective. A writer with Al-Manar Al- Jadid – a magazine with a reformist Islamist tendency – when faced with the difficult balance between globalization’s advantages and disadvantages, resorted to calling on Muslim youths (at the end of his article “Muslim youth and globalization”) to recite the “guidance prayer” at night so that in the morning they could resolve globalization’s advantages from its disadvantages. [48] Thus, even from an Islamist perspective, globalization can be a matter of “equal evidences.”

QUESTIONING THE READINESS OF ARAB CULTURE

I do not claim to have examined all facets of the globalization discourse in contemporary Arab culture; at any rate there are too many to grasp them all. I did not examine the discourses that view globalization with a more positive eye, or those that call for dealing with its inevitability more realistically; these discourses are less apparent and, particularly, less noisy. In the context of the historical impasse of the Arab condition, it is hard for these discourses to find attentive ears. When history seems at a bottleneck, shouts of fear naturally attract more attention than quiet and more objective thinking. Thus, the immediate and more present image of globalization in Arab perception is that of the scarecrow, or even the octopus. These images, accompanied by the vocabulary of the trap can be witnessed frequently in the prevalent discourses in Arab culture concerned with globalization.

But the main gap in these discourses of fear is the lack of  awareness for the real preconditions which necessary to respond to the challenge of globalization, not in the space of theoretical abstraction, but on the ground of Arab reality.

Given the fragile situation of Arab Culture – there are more 105 million illiterate Arabs, according to UNESCO statistics – the greater danger of globalization (from the cultural standpoint) is not being preyed upon by globalization, but rather remaining outside of it. Contrary to the discourse of ideological mobilization against globalization  I believe that the real issue in this fragile situation is how to access globalization, not how to avoid it or to rebel against it. Before receiving it in good or bad spirit, we do not yet have the cultural preconditions to receive it. And if we talk about the impact of globalization on Arab culture, we have to notice first and foremost that we lack the essential basics and the tools to deal with this impact.

Except for sub-Saharian Africa, Arab Culture is marked by one of the worst rates of illiteracy in the world. In addition to the current 100 million or so illiterate Arabs, this number is likely to increase rather than decrease - in absolute figures - in the coming quarter of a century, to reach between 115 million and 125 million in 2025 according to forecasts by the UNESCO. The simple reason is that demographic growth outpaces – and will most likely continue to do so - the increasing rates of literacy. Egypt, for example, as the largest Arab country, witnessed a decrease in illiteracy rates to 48.6% in 1995 compared to 55.4% 10 years before and 61.8% 20 years before. Doubtless, Egypt is achieving certain relative progress in combating illiteracy. But due to its high population growth rate, the absolute number of illiterate people is increasing, even if the rate of illiteracy decreases. Although the rate of illiteracy decreased from 61.8% in 1975 to 48.6% in 1995, the number of illiterate Egyptians increased during the same 20-year period from 24 million to 28.8 million. [49]

And even if we leave aside illiterate Arabs when dealing with the issue of  globalization’s entrance into our world, or our entrance into the age of globalization, and only concern ourselves with the literate part of our population, we notice an inertia that is no less dangerous than illiteracy when it comes to dealing with the primary vehicles of cultural globalization, i.e. the new information technologies. If we examine the existing infrastructure on this account, we can not help to notice a significant lack of essential equipment to necessary to bridge the gap between the Arab Culture and the process of globalization . Let us again take the example of Egypt, the largest Arab state and historically the first to join modernity, and let us apply four indicators of quantitative measurements for globalization: saturation rates per 1,000 people of reading newspapers and being equipped with radio, television and video sets. Let us compare it to the United States, the world’s leader in globalization; an advanced European country like Britain; the most advanced country in Asia, that is, Japan; to South Korea, a newly-taking off country in Asia; Brazil, a developing Latin American country; India, a still largely underdeveloped country in Asia; and, finally, Israel, which remains crucial to any comparison because it was until recently the national enemy of Egypt and the Arabs.

Table of press, radio, television and video saturation rates per 1,000 people of the population [50]

Press (copies)

Radio (sets)

Television (sets)

 Video (sets)

 Egypt 

 57

 310

 150

 30

 USA 

 227

 2.123

 815

 815

 Britain

 395

 1,480

 720

 310

 Japan

 581

 960

 600

 210

 South Korea 

 280

 990

 290

 90

 Brazil 

 62

 460

 260

 30

 India

 23

 90

 50

 10

 Israel 

 188

480 

 280

 140

Egypt does not excel in cultural readiness rates except in comparison to India, which ranks 140 among the world’s 175 countries, according to the Human Development Index of the UN Development Program. [51] True, the two countries have similar illiteracy rates (48.8% in Egypt and 48% in India), yet Egypt outranks India in terms of the press saturation rate more than twofold and in terms of the radio, television and video saturation rates more than threefold. But Egypt lags behind Brazil by one-tenth in terms of the press saturation rate, one-third concerning radios and two-thirds with respect to television. Brazil ranks 65 in the Human Development Index, while Egypt ranks 86. Compared to a newly-taking off Asian country, that is, South Korea, which ranks 36 in the index, Egypt seems lagging in terms of the press saturation rate fivefold, with respect to radios threefold, regarding television twofold and on the subject of video threefold. Compared to Japan, which entered modernity at the same time as Egypt, now ranking eighth in the index, Egypt lags in terms of the press saturation rate tenfold and regarding radio, television and video threefold, fourfold and sevenfold respectively. [52]

This comparison is limited to classical information technologies. If we reach the primary tools of what has come to be called “the electronic culture” of the globalized era, that is, computer and internet use, Arab, and not just Egyptian, cultural readiness seems very poor. Available figures – they are growing continuously – show that while the world, up until the end of 1997, had more than one-third of a billion computers, the Arab world’s share was not more than around 2.3 million computers. This means that the Arab world, which demographically represents around 4.3% of the world’s population, does not have more than 0.61% of the world’s computers. The percentage drops to less than one per 1,000 when it comes to Arab subscribers to the Internet. While more than 40 million computers in the world were connected to the Internet in the beginning of 1999, their number in all of the Arab countries was not more than 31,000. This means that the percentage of Arab subscription in the Internet was not more than 0.77 per 1,000. [53]

By way of comparison Finland, which is halfway in terms of development and ranks 22 in the Human Development Index, made it obligatory that secondary schools, not just universities, own computers. Meanwhile, computers have not yet entered Arab secondary schools, except in rare cases, and are not yet common in Arab universities. As an example, the Jordanian press in the beginning of October 1999 welcomed a decision by the authorities to introduce 1,000 computers to the Jordanian University in 2000. This decision is of course welcome, but the value of 1,000 computers does not exceed one million dollars today. This invites a question – which is outside the scope of this article – about the economic ability of Arab countries to introduce electronic cultural technologies. It also raises the more important question about the need in the Arab world to reconsider development priorities and restore to the currently underestimated cultural development factor the importance it deserves. When we are told that a computer can do two billion different operations in one second, an amount  that previously would have required 1,000 years, [54] and that fiber optics can transport 1,000 billion pieces of information per second over a distance of  1,000 kilometers  – totaling an 84-million-page encyclopedia [55] – we can be confident that the primary development factor in the 21st century will be the brain, before the hand. This century will be one of cultural revolution and soft technology, compared to the 20th and 19th centuries of industrial revolution and hard technology.

GLOBALIZING THE ARAB WORLD

If this is the situation of Arab cultural infrastructure, and if Arab countries are not culturally equipped to receive globalization, then the concept of anti-globalization – currently in circulation in Arab cultural scene – appears as just another instance, if under a shiny theoretical name, of what I have described as a mechanism for controlling the realm of discourse rather than the realm of reality.

It should be noted, however, that the author who coined the term – the Tunisian linguist Abdel-Salam Al-Massadi – has himself warned against a utopian use this concept, stressing that its "antism" must be understood, not as a contradicting antism but rather a dialectical antism which does not negate what exists, but comes itself into being by dialoguing with it and trying to surpass it. Massadi clearly states: “The concept of globalization that we used in the cultural examination of our book Globalization and Anti-Globalization does not mean that we negate globalization or radically oppose its existence. We do not call whatsoever for resisting it. If we did any of this or claimed this, we would have been absolute utopians. What we are calling for is to implant a new awareness, whereby anti-globalization becomes a mental mechanism that does not rely on destructive contradictions, but rather on active, dialectical opposition.” [56]

Yet, the concept, thanks to its strong polarizing wording and mobilizing heft, has broken away like a genie released from its bottle, an has acquired  ideological independence unrelated to the epistemological purpose for which it was created. It has gained currency within Arab cultural discourse at an amazing speed, as a slogan of confrontation and resistance, and as a credible label for an alternative globalization, defined by some  as, “real versus fake globalization,” or, in the words of Mahmoud Amin Al-Alim: “The globalization of the right, not of the wrong; the globalization of freedom, not of enslavement and tyranny; the globalization of acquaintance, knowledge and creativity, not of ignorance, alienation, underdevelopment and dependence.” [57]

To escape from this thought-paralyzing polarization between globalization and anti-globalization, I believe that realistic and critical thought should lead us to suggest the idea of globalizing the Arab world, parallel to the international process of globalization, to improve our chances to make use of globalization’s advantages and eschew its disadvantages, rather than seeking confrontation and "antisms".

In that big global village that the world is about to become, according to Marshall McLuhan, 'the prophet of the new communication era', the Arab world, which is stagnating more than ever before as a result of its internal divisions, needs itself to become first a unified regional village. That, I believe, is its shortest road to safely enter globalization’s village – or its “jungle,” as its opponents say.
Since one possible definition of globalization is the removal of borders, and since I am focusing exclusively on cultural globalization, let me immediately say that the borders I believe must be removed in the Arab world are the cultural borders. I believe we have enough realistic sense to understand that the political borders in the Arab world – in spite of our former ideological illusions that they were “cardboard” and “artificial” – are now and maybe until further notice indelible. Yet, the Arab world, in spite of the consecration of its borders and its domestic divisions, variations and personalities (there’s no lack of terms), has never ceased to represent a unified cultural group. Otherwise, the Arab world, being a world, would not have been able to characterize itself and be characterized by others as the Arab world.

To avoid taking off  into the skies of abstraction myself, let me immediately say that new communication technologies are what will allow this breaching of Arab cultural borders to come about  with a sufficient degree of safety and efficiency. The first sign of this breach is already witnessed by Arab satellite channels, which, without a doubt (in spite what has been said about their performance, as well as their financing and recruitment), have succeeded, at least partially, in compacting the area of the Arab world, despite its vastness and its political topography.

Another example is the possibility – in fact already a reality in some cases – that new communication technology can print the same publications across Arab capitals, and at the same time of the same Arab newspapers and magazines.

If in the near future it becomes possible to develop the Internet network in the Arab world, another manifestation of inter-Arab borders, that is, domestic censorship of thought and its circulation – via books, magazines and newspapers – will collapse or at least be breached. On the Internet, the censor cannot step in.

We should not  imagine the process of breaching or removing cultural borders as purely negative. I can imagine a kind of positive Arab globalization whereby the Arab League – after its position is reconsidered to enhance its cultural functions – plays an active role. Within this framework, I can imagine the creation of an Arab Extranet [58] that connects Arab scientific institutions and universities, putting an end to the chaos, repetition and wasted effort and money of Arab research and allowing for coordination among Arab university dissertations – disseminating their benefits though the Arab world instead of merely collecting dust in the archives. [59] Within this framework I can imagine a network connecting Arab museums, and also a network to “revive” Arab manuscripts in Arab and foreign universities and libraries, making them available to all researchers without having to travel and waste money and time.

Supporters of the “Arab cultural security” argument may object, saying that breaching borders will not only occur between Arabs to Arab, but will necessarily also be a breach by “foreign” forces. Although I put this term between quotation marks as a hint that this argument is rather eroded in our contemporary world, I will point out that this breach does exist as one of the inevitabilities of our current times. Although there is no response to it, I will also point out that such a phenomenon is not necessarily one-way; it can be employed in the other direction. Here’s merely one example: Arab emigrants in Europe, the Americas, Australia and Africa number in the tens of millions, and modern communication means will allow for a thus far nonexistent opportunity to reconnect them, if not to their motherland, to their mother culture. Part of this role is now being played by Arab satellite channels.

In any event, as it is sometimes said in strategic studies, the best way of defense is attack. I assert that the best way to face globalization is to be present in it, not absent from it. Globalization, whether we like it or not, is present in us; let us learn how to be present in it; our being absent from globalization is the worst manifestation of it being present in us.

As globalization allowed for the appearance of a new economic pole in the world – the Asian pole – and as it allowed for a shared European pole of information  (Euronews versus CNN), nothing should stop us from thinking – or deciding – that it is possible to one day have a common Arab cultural pole. Although light years separate us from the possibility of realizing this dream which, to begin with, is related to a series of radical democratic and modernizing changes in the Arab world, we do not have a choice other than dreaming it.

Why? Because we simply refuse to let ourselves be crammed  between the rock of Fukuyama and the hard place of  Huntington. Neither the “end of history,” nor “the clash of civilizations” is inevitable. I am against any argument of a stereotyped history under the hegemony of one global civilization which eradicates anything else. I am against any argument of a torn history that, through global clashes, re-establishes the world in isolated and conflicting islands of civilization. I believe the world is heading to be, for the first time in history, unified in civilization and pluralistic in cultures. Globalization may be the tool of this dialectic between a global civilization and national cultures.
But this has one condition, which some may describe it as utopian, that globalization ceases to be a tool of hegemony and becomes a tool of participation. To avoid the impression that I, too, am practicing the exercise of controlling discourse and ignoring facts, let me immediately say that correcting the equation of globalization  from hegemony to participation does not require absolute equality in the shares of partners.

Globalization is more of a shareholding company; and our position in it is decided by the size of our portfolio of shares. According to our demographic size, the ceiling of our shares cannot be more than 3.4%; otherwise, we ourselves would be among the dominators. Yet, even this ceiling is too high for us in the foreseeable future. The Arab world is not entering globalization’s company as ONE shareholder, thus, its virtual portfolio is itself distributed among many shareholders who often disagree and clash.
Also, the Arab world, much of which is still part of the Third World and some of the Fourth World, is not equal in terms of material and cultural productivity with other shareholders, especially when compared with the leading founders of globalization who, despite the relative smallness of their demographic size, own 80% of humanity’s material production and 95% of its intellectual production. In an interim stage, we can be realistic if we dream of increasing our share in globalization’s company from one-thousandth to one-hundredth during no less than a quarter of a century. This is the minimum needed for a "take off,” as witnessed in the experiences of East and Southeast Asian nations.
Yet if we, all or some of us, will be unable to take off during the coming quarter of a century, we will not have the right to blame our failure to correct globalization on globalization itself. The globalization equation is open and has several unknowns and changing values; if any unknown is currently hard to assess, it is the Arab unknown, especially as we live in difficult times of high tension, between those who accept and those who reject modernity.

In fact, within the framework of this polarization that overwhelms contemporary Arab culture with its immense weight, globalization changes from being an equation to become a set of problems. Globalization’s presence in us and our presence in it, specifically from a cultural perspective, is important in terms of how, as well as how much. If we do not give this enough consideration, we will be risking making the mistake of separating the tool and the spirit. This separation may be possible economically and technologically, even in terms of information, but it is not possible culturally. Globalization, from a cultural perspective, is not a neutral phenomenon. It carries its own culture.

While Arab culture, like every other culture in the world, has no choice but to integrate with globalization, this integration in the Arab case seems likely to entail conflict, rather than accord, because the cultural values held by the globalization process seem largely paradoxical, even contradictory, to prevalent values in Arab culture.

Globalization’s culture is definable as worldly – I do not say secular – while Arab culture is still scheduled to the religious calendar and inhabited by an apocalyptic preoccupation.[60] Globalization’s culture, coming from a society characterized by abundance, has a hedonistic tendency based on maximizing the current moment to the limit of uninhibited consumerism. Whereas the Arab culture, as a culture of a society characterized by scarcity, is still governed by the logic of contentment, abstention, material saving for bad times and spiritual saving for the afterlife.

Globalization’s culture, as primarily a culture of images, is based on the presence of the body and does not hesitate to reveal and expose it, especially the female body. Arab culture is based on treating the body with shame and covering it, especially, also, the female body. [61] From this perspective, there is much that separates the two cultures in terms of what is sanctioned and what is banned in the realm of sexuality: globalization’s culture gives too much freedom to love; whereas Arab culture allows too little freedom. [62]

These paradoxes and many others turn the integration of the culture of globalization and Arab culture into a scenario of harsh ruptures, which might be necessary to achieve a momentum that  I will describe – in a term borrowed from sociology – as cultural mobility.

I believe that cultural mobility is the best solution to the double dilemma that threatens integration between the culture of globalization and Arab culture. There is the dilemma of self- isolation – cocooning in a cultural stereotype or a strangling fundamentalism – and the dilemma of self-dislocation – drifting with an annihilating globalization process.

Cultural mobility, combining the leash of authenticity and the spur of globalized modernity, seems more capable than any other mechanism of quickly controlling Arab cultural development, to correct its direction and to avoid the potholes on both sides of its trajectory. If the leash-spur dialectic seems too colloquial, we can replace it with a more poetic dialectic, that of roots and wings. As we all know, the concept of roots is highly appreciated these days in all world cultures who feel an undisputed need to return to their selves and adhere to their roots, fearing an uprooting by the winds of globalization which, also undisputedly, often turn into a storm. But the roots simile does not seem to me adequate or sufficient enough to guarantee the minimum, let alone the optimal cultural dynamism. This simile, which is taken from the botanical kingdom of trees, can be supported and balanced by a simile taken from the zoological kingdom of birds.

National cultures, including Arab culture, need wings as much as they need roots in the process of integration within a globalized culture. If there is a decisive question about the future of Arab culture in the era of globalization, it is this: How will Arab culture remain rooted in its soil and land, and yet at the same time fly in the skies of globalization?

I have said that a quarter of a century is the minimum amount of time needed on the Arab side to begin correcting the quantitative globalization equation from being subject to the hegemony of others to relative partnership. The same quarter of a century may also be needed to develop an Arab response that is congruent to the challenge of globalization, in as much as it is a qualitative cultural problematic. No one can predict now what the Arab unknown will produce during the coming quarter of a century, nor how the disagreement on the most fundamental of all controversial issues in contemporary times, globalization, will be resolved. However, away from the lamentations of narcissists wound and the boastings of inflated egos, the lessons of realism, which does not believe in miraculous leaps, forces me toward pessimism at the beginning of this period, but without closing the door to optimism altogether. [63]

NOTES

[1] Hassan Mneimneh, “Lessons of history and globalization in the view of Patrick Buchanan,” Al- Hayat, 3/10/1999, p. 18.
[2] Viviane Forrester, L’horreur économique, Librairie Fayard, Paris 1996.
[3] Alain Minc, La mondialisation heureuse, Plon, Paris 1997.
[4] Philippe Moreau Defarges, La mondialisation, vers la fin des frontières? Dunod, Paris 1993.
[5] Serge Latouche, L’occidentalisation du monde, La Découverte, Paris 1989.
[6] Serge Latouche, Les dangers d’une économie planétaire, Presse des Sciences Politique, Paris 1998.
[7] « La mondialisation: a-t-elle une âme? » (Sous la direction de B. Gardre, PH. Chalmin, et N. Tissot), Economica, 1998.
[8] The UN Human Development Report, 2002.
[9] The UN Development Program report, 1997.
[10] A negative perception of food globalization connects it to the worldwide spread of McDonald’s restaurants or Coca- Cola. In fact, this globalization phenomenon is inseparable from an earlier globalization of other foodstuffs, like wheat or rice, or even the potato – which originated with Native American agriculture. Coca- Cola’s globalization is indiscernible from the globalization of tea or coffee, which no one objects to. Pizza’s globalization preceded that of McDonald’s, yet it is not being denounced. This means that the condemnation of McWorld does not stem from its dissemination of a “hamburger culture” but merely from it being American.
[11] This legal globalization, which was originally tied to the worldwide spread of human rights, had its most recent manifestation in a British court’s decision on October 8, 1999 to hand over former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet to the Spanish authorities, to be tried by the Spanish judiciary for crimes of torture and physical liquidation.
[12] Actually, one Arab country came into direct contact with globalization: the United Arab Emirates, particularly Dubai. However, the small demographic size of the emirate and its dire need of labor prevented it from becoming an Arab Hong Kong.
[12a] Translator's note: The adjective shumuli used in the original Arabic text carries the double meaning of "general" and "totalitarian".
[13] Parallel to this noise by intellectuals about the concept of globalization, there is a tendency for silence among the leading players in Arab finances, economy and industry.
[14] It is hard to come up with a statistical inventory, but concerning seminars there have occurred: “Arabs and Globalization” in Beirut, “Globalization and Issues of Cultural Identity” in Cairo, “Islam and Globalization” in Cairo and “Globalization and the Cultural Characteristic” in Doha. With respect to translation, one series, the National Translation Project of the Higher Council for Culture in Egypt, issued four huge books: Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World by Benjamin Barber; Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture by Ronald Robertson; The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy by Anthony Giddens; and Globalization in Question by Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson. As for Arabic books dedicated to globalization, I mention Globalization by Jalal Ahmad Amin, Globalization and the Third Way by El-Sayyed Yassin, Globalization and Anti-Globalization by Abdel-Salam Massadi and Arabizing Globalization by Mohammad Hafez Yaaqoub.
[15] Al-Karmel, issue 9, 1983, p.p. 12-34.
[16] I quote this expression from the title of the whole issue dedicated by Alam Al-Fikr: “Globalization, the Phenomenon of Current times.”
[17] Ronald Robertson, Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture, translated by Ahmad Mahmoud and Noura Amin and reviewed by Mohammad Hafez Yaaqoub, the National Translation Project, Higher Council for Culture, Cairo 1998, p. 376.
[18] Hans Peter Martin et Harold Schumann, Le piège de la mondialisation: L’ agression contre la démocratie et la prospérité, traduit de l’allemand par Oliver Mannoni, Solin, Actes/Sud, Paris 1997.
[19] Including, for example, an open seminar by Dr. Khaled Abdullah, economics professor at Bahrain University, held at the Association of Bahraini Economists. Its contents were published in Al- Nashra al-Ikhbariya of the Bahrain University, issue 77, July 1999, under the headline “The Trap of Globalization… the Trap for Humanity” and the subtitle “Globalization: A Human Trap Resembling the Wildness of the Jungle.”
[20] Abdel-Ilah Balqaziz, “Globalization and Cultural Identity,” in Globalization and the Arabs, Center for Arab Unity Studies, Beirut 1998, p. 24.
[21] Mutaa Safadi, “The Role of Globalization in the Imperialism of the Absolute,” Al-Wifaq al-Arabi, issue 2, volume 1, August 1999, p. 24.
[22] Burhan Ghalioun, “The Arab World Vis-à-Vis the Challenges of the 21st Century; Big Challenges,  Little determination,” Al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi, issue 232, June 1998, p. 14, quoted in Mohammad Hafez Diab, “Arabizing Globalization: A Critical Issue,” Qadaya Muaasira, October 1999, p. 151.
[23] Mohammad Audah, “Americanization, Not Globalization” at the seminar Anti-Globalization, moderated by Abdel-Monem Talima, in a supplement of Sutur, issue 33, August 1999, p. 45.
[24] Ibid, p. 49
[25] Hussein Ahmad Amin, “Conspiracy and Conspirators,” Sutur, issue 33, August 1999, p.p. 18- 21.
[26] Mohammad Abed Jaberi, “Globalization Targets the State, the Nation and the Homeland,” Al-Sharq al-Awsat, February 7, 1997, p. 10.
[27] Ihtidal Othman, “Against the Death of Human Beings,” Sutur, issue 26, January 1999, p.p. 14- 15.
[28] Sayyed Bahrawi, “The Death of the Intellectual or his Murder?” ibid, p.p. 41-43.
[29] Mahmoud Amin Al- Alim, “The Debate of Beginnings and Endings,” ibid, p.p. 4-7.
[30] Taher Labib, “The Arab Intellectual and the Inevitability of Globalization ,” Al-Wifaq al-Arabi, p.p. 20-21.
[31] Georges Tarabichi, The Arab Intellectuals and the Heritage: The Psychological Result of a Collective Neurosis, Riad Rayyes Books, London 1991.
[32] Mohammad Sayyed Said, “Globalization and cultural values in Egypt,” Qadaya Fikriya, October 1999, p. 181.
[33] Georges Tarabichi, “Arab intellectuals ailing from the West,” Abwab, issue 20, spring 1999, p.p. 113- 127.
[34] To these Islamists, I can add “populist” Christian Arab intellectuals, including, for example, Egypt’s Anwar Abdel-Malak and Palestine’s Mounir Shafiq.
[35] From an interview with the Riyadh-based Al-Alam, issue 9, volume 2, October 1999, p. 65.
[36] Jalal Amin, Globalization, Iqraa Series, Dar Al-Maaref, Cairo 1998, p. 11
[37] Ibid, p. 38.
[38] The author of Globalization purposefully talks about “transmitting and storing information,” ignoring the first transmission of modern civilization – the production of knowledge and the invention of information.
[39] Globalization, ibid, p. 45.
[40] Ibid, p.p. 53 -56.
[40a] Editor's note: An article by Professor Jalal Amin on "Globalization and its Challenges to Arab Culture" is in the process of being translated and will be published on this website soon.
[41] Sheikh Dr. Saud Funaysan, an interview with Al-Alam, ibid.
[42] Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World, translated by Ahmad Mahmoud, Nationalist Translation Project, the Higher Council for Culture, Cairo 1998, p. 21. (The title of the Arabic translation was: McWorld: The Confrontation Between Accommodation and Globalization)
[43] Ibid, p. 185.
[44] Fahmi Huwaidi, “Contemporary Jihad via the Internet,” Al-Ahram al-Arabi, issue 41217, October 12, 1999, p. 1.
[45] Ibid, p. 3.
[46] From the introduction of a booklet by the Notification Association for Serving Islam via the Internet, Doha, Qatar, p. 1.
[47] Al- Akhbar (Cairo), October 22, 1999.
[48] Kamel Sharif, “Muslim Youths and Globalization,” Al-Manar Al-Jadid, issue 7, July 1999, Cairo.
[49] George Tarabichi, “The Arab World and the World: A Statistical Introduction,” Abwab, issue 11, winter 1997, p.p. 118-135.
[50] The figures of this table date back to 1994. They are available in Medias, sous la direction de Claude Jean Bertband, Editions Ellipses, Paris1995.
[51] The Human Development Index, L’état du monde, La Découverte, Paris 1997, p.p. 644-648.
[52] Some statistical data about the “global information society” are available in Ignacio Ramonet, La tyrannie de la communication, Galilée, Paris 1999. Ramonet points out that the information technologies market amounted in 1997 to more than $720 billion and that the total figure of international information and communication industries will reach in 2000 more than $2,000 billion, or 10% of the world economy.
[53] Mohammad Adib Ghunaimi, “The Arab information network project,” a supplement of Sutur on the theme “Globalization, the Arab world and the future,” ibid, p. 12.
[54] Abdel- Khaleq Abdullah, “Globalization: Its roots, branches and how to deal with it,” Alam al- Fikr, October- December 1999, p. 64.
[55] From a statement by the National Research Institute of France Telecom.
[56] From an interview in Al-Wifaq al-Arabi, ibid, p. 30.
[57] Mahmoud Amin Alim, “Ends,” Sutur, ibid, p. 7.
[58] The Extranet is a network that links several institutions of common or similar goals, compared to the Intranet, which connects the apparatuses and sectors of the same institution.
[59] A worldwide web is in the making under the name “Internet 2” to link together 150 American universities and between them and “outside” universities in Canada, Germany, Singapore, India, Israel and others.
[60] If we look at the media coverage of the solar eclipse on August 11, 1999 and compare between the international television and radio networks on the one hand, and some Arabic networks on the other, the contrast is striking indeed, to say the least: while the first dealt with the eclipse in a purely scientific manner, as a natural geophysical phenomenon, the Arab stations added to it a spiritual dimension, as if it was also a supernatural phenomenon. Without denying the scientific explanations for the phenomenon, these networks would also transmit – in sound and image – special prayers held during the eclipse in more than one Arab and Islamic capital.
[61] The international satellite channels, which can be received through satellite dishes, pose a real dilemma for those in charge of “public decency” in the Arab world. One of the “exiled” Arab newspapers reported, some two years ago, a news item about a demonstration organized by religious institutions in the northern Syrian town of Aleppo, protesting the “obscenity” of one of the stations broadcasting from neighboring Turkey. Not to forget the French channel TV5 which is part of the package broadcast via one of the Arab satellites and had to face serious trouble after airing a program about a nudist club.
[62] This difference exists not only between global culture on the one hand and the dominant elements of Arab culture on the other, but also within Arab culture itself. At the same time where the Egyptian cinema, under severe pressure from the fundamentalists, was forced to impose a virtual ban on any form of nudity or body contact, including even “virginal’ kisses, the Lebanese satellite channels enjoy great success in the Arab World, with a least one reason being the dense female presence in their programming. Likewise, the francophone Moroccan cinema, which is relatively free from fundamentalist pressures, employs the female body in its visual language in ways the Egyptian cinema did not know even during its most liberal age.
[63] This optimism may be justified in the long run by what could almost be called a law of enculturation, which is the primary mechanism of integration between international civilizations and national cultures where modernity did not develop organically. The incoming civilization factor, hard to assimilate in the beginning – if not ejected by the national culture’s stomach – will eventually be settled, accommodated, naturalized and even “nationalized.” Evidence can be seen in the story of the introduction of tomatoes into Aleppo at the end of the 19th century. This vegetable, called in Geographic Syria bnadoura in a distortion of its Italian name (pomodoro), is called in Aleppo boud al-franjina in an indication of its foreign source. (By the way, tomatoes are neither Italian nor European; they, like potatoes, are among the gifts that Native American agriculture offered to humanity.) Aleppo’s residents first refused to consume tomatoes, let alone cultivate them, because their red color contradicted the idea that they are vegetables (“greens” in Arabic). Thus, they called them “Satan’s behind” and the city’s mufti banned their consumption. But a few years later, the cultivation of tomatoes became rampant across geographic Syria and “localized” to the extent that good tomatoes were called baladiya (domestic).

Translated from Arabic by Abdelrahman Ayas

Original text published in: Georges Tarabichi (2000), From Arab Renaissance to Apostasy - Arab Culture and its Discontents in the Age of Globalization;  London / Beirut: Saqi Books.

 Georges Tarabichi is an Arab writer and thinker living in Paris.

Copyright of all translations published on this website ©  Heinrich Böll Foundation - Middle East Office

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