Liberalism is the solution - an arab voice

disclaimer:
This article represents the views and thoughts of its original author, and is published here in an attempt to give space to various voices to speak about the current issues. Original text in Arabic can be found here .
This is an effort to create an as-close-as-possible translation to the original text. I am not a professional translator, I am simply a multi-lingual person who wants to show different points of view to others, especially the views and thoughts of the arab left wing about current issues..
Omar

Liberalism is the solution
by Taleb
Mawla - Taken from The Middle
East Transparent web portal

The story goes on.. Another episode of killings, destruction and damage spread across the Arab and Islamic worlds for the most simple and non-crucial things. The Arab and Muslim people went out in angry bloody demonstrations, leaving destruction and fires behind it, chanting the most extremist slogans while demonstrating, thinking that they are a driving force of this world, forgetting that they are still live off the charity of the “Pagan” west.!!!!!!

This story repeats itself in the wounded Iraq after the explosions of Samerra, which started a secular propaganda that spread all across Iraq, leaving the poor and the wretched Iraqis victims of these slogans.
Again, Iraq is destructed by the hands of terrorists and the hands of its
own people in a secular war that was always sought and planned by extreme right-wing Muslim clans.. Planned and manifested by destroying the two holly tombs in Samerra.

I can’t understand how people can rage for a mosque or a cartoon, and not move a finger for those who get killed everyday by suicide bombers in Iraq. Nor could I understand why they wouldn’t demonstrate for the
thousands killed in Iraq and Algeria, or the millions dying of hunger in Africa.

This is the charade of the Arab mind.

This way, Muslims -in all Islamic counties and news channels- find their opportunity to exploit hot issues like these (and there’s always an issue for the Arab world) to demonstrate our conspiracy theories, our theories about the American/Zionist plan to steal the fortunes of the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the legend of Israel nation from the
Euphrates to the Nile.
The funny thing about this sad story that some people marketed this explosion in Samerra to be a distraction for Muslim to set their minds off the story of the cartoons that offended the Prophet Muhammad.

I don’t know if our Arab world needs all these efforts from western nations.. A world that cannot even manufacture matches without resorting to the west.. a world where people are oppressed by their own ruling system… a nation that lives off mythologies, dreams, and the desire to reinstate the Islamic caliphate system by a miracle like Noah’s flood, or by the return of the “Mehdi” or by a heavenly thunder bolt that will hit and destroy the atheist world…

It is this nation that actually needs a thunderbolt.. maybe they will
resort back to reason.
Why didn’t Arabs learn from the experience of the Japanese and the Germans after they were completely destructed in world war I and II.. How they (the Germans and the Japs’) could rise from their downfall
they were put through by the coalition forces, and how they decided to reject violence and ethnic massacres, and replaced these thoughts with reconstruction and hard work until they became two major players in culture, technology and science ?

Why didn’t we learn from these modern historic stories?

Or maybe it is that the Arab mind has panic attack and agoraphobia, or
maybe it is the inherited Arab / Muslim genes that refuse to make use of others’ experiences as Dr. Ahmad Baghdadi says.

Dr. Terki Al Hamad answers these questions in his book “Politics between what’s religiously allowed, and what’s religiously forbidden” .. he resorts this backwardness to the concept of movement/stillness, in reference to Ernest Renan’s quote: “The greatest advance by modern thought is replacing the concept of the “being” by the concept of “the image”, and the concept of “the absolute” by the concept of “the relative”, and replacing stillness with movement.”
This concept is the best summary of the modern age and the philosophy that lives off change, movement and the opening to other civilizations, which is the exact opposite of that in the Arab mentality that was brought upon doubting and fearing the others.

So, how can the Arab and Islamic world get out of its current backward
reality?

Firstly: by re-phrasing the Arabic and Islamic concepts by performing a new critical reading of the Islamic history, and by studying the history and evolution of western school of thought. This school of thought could exist through wars led by philosophers and thinkers against the philosophy of the central church that forced the individual to obey the church’s authority. This caused the church to lose its spiritual and religious authority (which was the reason for its existence) and it went towards the amalgamation of the spiritual and materialistic religion. It even became a cheap tool in the hands of kings to generate rewards and income for the political power that controls the people through the church’s religious authority.

The need thus becomes evident for a protestant Islam, as put by the Iranian thinker Hashem Aghajari, who invited people to understand religion without reverting to the religious authoritarians and their endless explanations and rule that keeps people under the control of the Islamic Religious doctrine.
This doctrine can be confronted only by criticizing the backward
religious ideology, renewing it and trying to understand reality by employing the human mind in the process -this mind that could tame nature- and deserting the concept of the surviving groups and eliminating the other, which has always brought disasters upon us.

Secondly: the importance of adopting liberal thinking that’s based on the individual’s right to adapt and follow any school of thought or belief, while respecting his freedom and rights, away from any national and religious ideologies that usually led to eliminating “the other” and depriving him from his right in choosing his beliefs, and practicing his freedom in the legal boundaries of a civil society.

Liberal thinking is the only system that ensures ethnic and religious
minorities’ rights. It is the system that ensures freedom of belief for the
citizens of one nation, without having to enforce any ideology on the others. It has proven to be capable of evolving itself based on the requirements and needs to meet changing realities, unlike the religious ideology that shies from evolving and merging into the new global system in the name of protecting the authenticity of the Arabic and Islamic Identity: the fear of losing our “ethical and religious values”.
This intentional continuous mutation is caused by political Islamic parties, as well as the slogan-making nationalists, who believe that they have the right to gain custody of everyone in the name of maintaining the ethics and values of society.. Their continuous association between liberalism and atheism, which –in their mind- leads to the diminishing
of ethical values of society, made liberals and liberal thinkers be looked upon as atheists and pagans..

The real reason behind this propaganda is their continuous fear (of the
nationalists and political islamists) of the rapid growth of liberal thinking, which would eventually find a system that allows people to co-exist in the same nation regardless of their ethnic and religious background.
This established socio-political liberal system will clash with their inability to find a system or a political-economical-religious vision, which forces them to continuously call to return to the origin of Islam (and the slogan: “Islam is the solution”) without clearly defining the representatives of this socio-political religion..

Many overlook the fact that the tide of change is coming anyway, regardless how hard they try to blind the eyes from seeing that many in the world are trying very hard to find ways to coexist in peace, safety and freedom.. and that those who stood in the faces of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton; and called them atheists and pagans for confronting the religious manuscripts by applying common sense to them… those didn’t know that they are standing against the tide of change, and against the authority of the mind that gave the logical explanations to natural phenomena, that were once considered mystical.

Finally, the painful events and daily bloodbaths’ the Arab and Islamic
worlds are going through, require us to stop weeping and whaling for a while, and stand together to stop the tide of this rightwing extremist religious doctrine that is led by a group of sick psychos who kill and destroy in the name of religion.

Real belief is based on believing in the importance of co-existing with
the others, respecting them and their religions and sects, and understanding that diversity is a global phenomenon that implies that we should co-work with people from all over the world to ensure mutual benefits and prosperous living.