Part Sixteen
(This is a translation from the original Arabic, offered so that my grandchildren,
and others of their generation, may understand something of their history— a
history they were denied when they were uprooted without choice.)
The Crisis of the Arab Educated Class (1)
In the preceding parts of this series, I surveyed how the Arab nation arrived at
its present condition, through a concise examination of the major political
movements that shaped the region during the twentieth century.
Today, I wish to write about what I hope may constitute a path forward for this
nation in the future.
Anyone who reflects on what he may become must first examine carefully what
he already is. Yet self-examination is never easy beyond one’s own experience
and that of those who resemble oneself. I cannot truly comprehend the inner
world of the worker or the peasant, for I have lived neither experience. I am
certain, however, that the Arab educated classes of the twentieth century—who
claimed to represent workers and peasants—failed in that task. Their political
experiment in claiming such representation proved, as we have seen, a failure.
I am not among those who say that the masses make history. I never have been,
and I do not believe I ever will be. I know that masses are led; they do not lead.
History, in every society, is made by elites. If those elites are not the
philosophers-kings envisioned by Plato, they are, without doubt, the educated
class of each society.
Under Ottoman rule, education was confined to those whom the state chose to
educate—meaning, in effect, that there was no genuine education for the Arabs
of the region. With the end of Ottoman rule, the region passed from Turkish
domination to European domination. The new colonizers were no more
concerned for our well-being than their Ottoman predecessors. As al-Mutanabbi
wrote a thousand years ago:
“People are shaped by their rulers;
No Arab prospers when ruled by non-Arabs.”
The Europeans, however, understood that education was indispensable. They
therefore established educational systems conducted in their own languages
rather than in Arabic, thereby planting the first seed of the crisis afflicting the
Arab educated class today.
One who is educated in a foreign tongue may become productive, but it is
exceedingly difficult for him to become creative. This claim may sound strange.
The Arab educated person has long taken pride in having studied at a particular
European university, to the point that such education has come to be regarded as
the measure of culture itself. There is some excuse for this, for many knew
nothing else and had no alternative available.
Yet the truth is otherwise. The human mind does not operate through such
simple mechanisms. One who is educated in another’s language thinks in that
language; and one who thinks in another’s language finds his capacity for
production and creativity constrained and limited. I do not wish to enter into a
philosophical debate here, for I am certain that many who were educated, as I
was, will object with Western theories claiming the opposite—ignoring the fact
that arguments founded on contested premises cannot serve as proof.
Instead, I will suffice with empirical evidence drawn from history and reality,
demonstrating that one who is educated in another’s language becomes
alienated from his people and produces little of originality, becoming instead a
transmitter and imitator.
The first witness comes from Arab history itself. There is no dispute that Arabs
produced, innovated, and made profound contributions to human thought during
the flourishing of the Abbasid state in Baghdad and the Umayyad state in al-
Andalus. The distinguishing feature of that era was that creativity occurred in
Arabic. Scholars strove, reasoned, and thought in Arabic—not in Greek or
Sanskrit—though they absorbed knowledge from other civilizations, translated
it into Arabic, and then thought through it in Arabic, producing original work.
Because education was conducted entirely in the people’s own language,
scholars were able to coin the terminology required for inquiry, progress, and
continuity. No one struggled to grasp the meaning of a Greek word in order to
express how a phenomenon moved from one natural state to another; such ideas
flowed effortlessly through Arabic intellectual structures.
I doubt anyone could tell us what Ibn al-Haytham might have become had he
been forced to think in Greek.
This view—that education in one’s own language enables creativity and
advancement—is further supported by two modern examples that merit careful
consideration: Israel and Finland.
Hebrew was not a living language; more accurately, it had been a dead
language, unused in writing for centuries. Yet the Jews who settled in Palestine
at the beginning of the twentieth century and established their state mid-
century—amid Arab disgrace, ignorance, and fragmentation—revived the
language and transformed it into a medium of education and culture.
Although the settler Jews arrived from all corners of the world speaking many
tongues—predominantly Yiddish from Eastern Europe—they succeeded in
building an educational system in modern Hebrew and teaching three
generations of their children through it. The Jew no longer thought in Polish,
English, or Arabic, as his father or grandfather had, but learned, thought, and
produced in Hebrew.
One might object that many settlers arrived already educated—and this is true.
Yet those born in Palestine, educated in Israeli universities, knew no language of
learning other than Hebrew. They are no different, as human beings, from their
counterparts in neighboring Arab countries, yet they surpassed graduates of our
universities in productivity. Today, scarcely a scientific conference takes place
anywhere in the world without a paper from an Israeli university. How many
Arab universities participate meaningfully in such conferences?
I do not mean universities in the Arabian Peninsula that invite a European or
American researcher, pay him generously, then attach the name of one of their
affiliates to the paper to claim authorship. The falsity of such practices is well
known.
The productivity and creativity of the Zionist Jew in Palestine today rest
primarily on the fact that new generations born and educated there think in
Hebrew and therefore innovate, while their Arab neighbors are lost thinking in
English, French, or Russian—languages they do not feel, struggling merely to
grasp their roots while attempting to conceptualize scientific ideas.
Finland, the second example, may be even more instructive—though Israel
remains a powerful case. Arabs know little about Finland, a relatively young
nation-state. The Finnish people were once small tribes speaking a single
tongue, inhabiting the far north. They did not establish a state until the end of
World War I, when Lenin honored his promise to Finnish communists who had
supported the Bolshevik Revolution by granting independence from Russia.
Before Russian rule, Finland had been governed by the Swedish crown for
centuries.
Despite its vast forests, Finland does not claim—unlike Baghdad—that it
manufactured paper in the tenth century. Finnish was not even written down
until the fifteenth century. Education for Finns was conducted in Swedish,
Russian, or German well into the post-independence period.
Finland emerged from World War II wounded and devastated, having paid a
heavy price for siding with Germany. What changed was that Finland, around
the same time as Israel’s emergence, recognized the value of education in its
own language. It established a robust educational system at all levels in
Finnish—a language spoken by fewer than four million people, not three
hundred million as is Arabic. It translated scientific knowledge into Finnish and
taught its children through it.
Three generations of Finns graduated reading and thinking in Finnish. Small
Finland became a global model of educational success, attracting delegations
from around the world to study its system. Despite possessing no coal, oil, or
gas, Finland rose to the forefront of Western Europe in productivity, science,
and technology. It suffices to note that the world’s first mobile phone was
produced by the Finnish company Nokia, created by innovators who studied
engineering in their own language.
All of this occurred not because Finns suddenly discovered they were different
from the rest of humanity, but because they educated their children in their own
language, freeing them from intellectual alienation—just as the Arabs had been
freed during the Abbasid era.
The lesson is clear: any nation that does not learn in its own language will never
truly think in its own language; and any nation that does not think in its own
language cannot produce anything new, for the imitator rarely innovates.
Thus, the Arab educated person suffers from a crisis of intellectual dislocation,
unable to create anything original. This intellectual alienation has generated a
deeper dimension of weakness—indeed, the erosion or absence of belonging,
not only to the concept of the nation, but to any collective identity whatsoever.
This is what I shall attempt to examine next.
To be continued…